Edna St. Vincent Millay Quotes

Poverty makes you sad as well as wise.

We were poor, my mother and I, living in a world of doom and gloom, pessimism and bitterness, where storms raged and wolves scratched at the door.

Our family has gone through a very difficult time. My husband and I have taken the brunt of it. I've never known what it truly felt like to be so sad and desperate inside.

I have lived poverty. I didn't choose it. No one would choose humiliation, pain, and rage.

I saw tough times, and there were many nights when I would just cry out aloud.

And one thing to be remembered: it is not that the people who are poor, starving, become frustrated with life - no. They cannot become frustrated. They have not lived yet - how can they be frustrated? They have hopes. A poor man always has hopes that something is going to happen - if not today then tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow; if not in this life then in the next life.

Devoutly the teachers point out huge fumigated domes; but beneath the statues there's no love, no love beneath the eyes set in crystal. Love is there, in flesh ripped by thirst, in the tiny hut struggling against the flood; love is there, in ditches where snakes of hunger wrestle, in the sad sea that rocks dead gulls, and in the darkest stinging kiss under pillows.

I did not know it was possible to be so miserable and live but I am told that this is a common experience.

Life is so damned hard, so damned hard... It just hurts people and hurts people, until finally it hurts them so that they can't be hurt ever any more. That's the last and worst thing it does.

He looked as though his life had not only passed him by but paused along the way to spit in his face.

Of course it hurts", she grumbled, tipping my head further back. "Life sucks. Get over it

When our life is a continuous trial, the moments of respite seem only to substitute the heaviness of dread for the heaviness of actual suffering; the curtain of cloud seems parted an instant only that we may measure all its horror as it hangs low, black, and imminent, in contrast with the transient brightness; the waterdrops that visit the parched lips in the desert bear with them only the keen imagination of thirst.

Loneliness and hunger were my fortunes of creation.

And who is any of us, that without starvation he can go through the kingdoms of starvation?

I don't smile much, and I never laugh. If you'd been through what I've been through, you wouldn't be smiling, either.

Want is misery.

My dad had a lot of bad luck. You could see his suffering, his terrible suffering, living a life that was disappointing and looking for another one.

I hate to see anybody sink. I hate to see anybody lose their dream, lose their home, something like that.

I don't care if I starve.

In deep sadness there is no place for sentimentality.

There is something about poverty that smells like death.

There was a point when I almost gave up. I couldn't feed myself. I couldn't feed my pets.

I think it is really sad that when people lose their homes they kind of lose their minds too.

My writing comes not from the happy moments, but from struggle and grief.