Edna St. Vincent Millay Quotes

All around me darkness gathers, Fading is the sun that shone, We must speak of other matters, You can be me when I'm gone Flowers gathered in the morning, Afternoon they blossom on, Still are withered in the evening, You can be me when I'm gone.

Thou art a little soul bearing about a corpse.

Time runs and flows and only our death succeeds in catching up with it. Photography is a blade which, in eternity, impales the dazzling moment.

We die only once, and for such a long time.

Gather ye rose-buds while ye may, Old Time is still a flying: And this same flower that smiles to day, Tomorrow will be dying.

I think we all lose in the end because we don't get to stay here forever.

Let this be my final lesson. Everyone and everything has a time to die.

Death, thou art infinite; it is life is little.

My dear fellow,' Burlingame said, 'we sit here on a blind rock careening through space; we are all of us rushing headlong to the grave. Think you the worms will care, when anon they make a meal of you, whether you spent your moment sighing wigless in your chamber, or sacked the golden towns of Montezuma? Lookee, the day's nigh spent; 'tis gone careening into time forever. Not a tale's length past we lined our bowels with dinner, and already they growl for more. We are dying men, Ebenezer: i'faith, there's time for naught but bold resolves!

When my mouth shall be filled with dust, and the worm shall feed, and feed sweetly upon me, when the ambitious man shall have no satisfaction if the poorest alive tread upon him, nor the poorest receive any contentment in being made equal to princes, for they shall be equal but in dust.

But at my back I always hear Time's winged chariot hurrying near; And yonder all before us lie Deserts of vast eternity. Thy beauty shall no more be found, Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound My echoing song; then worms shall try That long preserv'd virginity, And your quaint honour turn to dust, And into ashes all my lust. The grave's a fine and private place, But none I think do there embrace.

When we are dead; rugs are no richer than a quick-thorn bed.

We are the dead. Our only true life is in the future. We shall take part in it as handfuls of dust and splinters of bone. But how far away that future may be, there is no knowing.

Out of the people that ever were, almost all of them are dead. There are way more dead people, and you're all gonna die and then you're gonna be dead for way longer than you're alive. Like that's mostly what you're ever gonna be. You're just dead people that didn't die yet.

Time's ruins build eternity's mansions.

The perpetual work of your life is but to lay the foundation of death.

Art is long, and time is fleeting, And our hearts, though stout and brave, Still, like muffled drums, are beating Funeral marches to the grave.

Everybody going to be dead one day, just give them time.

Our works in stone, in paint, in print, are spared, some of them, for a few decades or a millennium or two, but everything must finally fall in war, or wear away into the ultimate and universal ash - the triumphs, the frauds, the treasures and the fakes. A fact of life: we're going to die. "Be of good heart," cry the dead artists out of the living past. "Our songs will all be silenced, but what of it? Go on singing." Maybe a man's name doesn't matter all that much.

Time is a great ocean which, like the other ocean, overflows with our remains.

The flesh surrenders itself. Eternity takes back its own. Our bodies stirred these waters briefly, danced with a certain intoxication before the love of life and self, dealt with a few strange ideas, then submitted to the instruments of Time. What can we say of this? I occurred. I am not...yet, I occurred.

Rien n'est plus parfait, plus acheve qu'un cadavre. Nothing is more perfect, more complete than a corpse.

He who was living is now dead We who were living are now dying With a little patience.