Edna St. Vincent Millay Quotes

Beauty means the scent of roses and then the death of roses.

Man passes away; his name perishes from record and recollection; his history is as a tale that is told, and his very monument becomes a ruin.

For some reason focusing on destruction and mortality is more poetically exciting to me than hope and love.

All things are only transitory.

I like things that are just about to go. Everything's leaving. Death is never far away from me. When you make something, death can't help but be in it.

Time destroys everything.

Time is not kind to everything.

Time is the devourer of all things.

Time is death.

The Flower that once has blown forever dies.

Dust, in the end, settles on everything.

Beauty is but a vain and doubtful good; a shining gloss that fadeth suddenly; a flower that dies when it begins to bud; a doubtful good, a gloss, a glass, a flower, lost, faded, broken, dead within an hour.

Beauty is but a flower Which wrinkles will devour; Brightness falls from the air; Queens have died young and fair; Dust hath closed Helen's eye.

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

All beauty that surrounds us must one day perish.

Look at everything that exists, and observe that it is already in dissolution and in change, and as it were putrefaction or dispersion, or that everything is so constituted by nature as to die.

Death! Strange that there should be such a word, and such a thing, and we ever forget it; that one should be living, warm and beautiful, full of hopes, desires and wants, one day, and the next be gone, utterly gone, and forever!

When I have seen by Time's fell hand defaced The rich proud cost of outworn buried age; When sometime lofty towers I see down-razed And brass eternal slave to mortal rage; When I have seen the hungry ocean gain Advantage on the kingdom of the shore, And the firm soil win of the watery main, Increasing store with loss and loss with store; When I have seen such interchange of state, Or state itself confounded to decay; Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate, That Time will come and take my love away. This thought is as a death which cannot choose But weep to have that which it fears to lose.

Our lives carry us along in ways we cannot control, and almost nothing stays with us. It dies when we do, and death is something that happens to us every day.

I was realizing, for the first time, that everything goes on, turns gray, is ruined in the living. That there is no end to our story until death comes and the body decays.

A man, when he burns, leaves only a handful of ashes. No woman can hold him. The wind must blow him away.

The course of Nature seems a course of Death, And nothingness the whole substantial thing.

Surely 't is better, when summer is over To die when all fair things are fading away.

For me, the problem of time is linked up with that of death, with the thought that we inevitably draw closer and closer to it, with the horror of decay.