Edna St. Vincent Millay Quotes

Disease, insanity, and death were the angels that attended my cradle, and since then have followed me throughout my life.

It was a time when only the dead smiled, happy in their peace.

Death is an art, you know.

What need is there to weep over parts of life? The whole of it calls for tears.

I remember burying a girl fourteen years of age who had died with a ruptured appendix... I buried a good many people that I knew, some of whom I loved.

At a certain age, death becomes familiar to you-or a loss becomes familiar-the tragedies that are more commonplace in life.

I lost my parents very early in my life. My mom died three weeks after I graduated from high school, and my dad died two years after I got married.

Blood and death. That moves me.

The death of a beautiful woman, is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world.

I don't mourn the dead. I mourn the living.

Oh eyes, no eyes, but fountains fraught with tears; O life, no life, but lively form of death; Oh world, no world, but mass of public wrongs.

Tragedy is one of the larger prices we pay for being alive. No one ever sidesteps tragedy. It is always there, shadowing us.

Death remains about the one certain fact in the lives of each one of us, and there will be suffering, sorrow, and sadness next week as there was last week.

To me, death is dark, pain, grief.

One half of my life has put the other half in the grave.

Death is always and under all circumstances a tragedy, for if it is not, then it means that life itself has become one.

This whole country is a graveyard, and we are all constantly walking on the bones

Too many mothers have lost their children, for thousands of different reasons.

Cancer has been a dark thread that has run throughout my life. It's taken my friends, my parents. My beautiful son.

The Young Soldier It is not death Without hereafter To one in dearth Of life and its laughter, Nor the sweet murder Dealt slow and even Unto the martyr Smiling at heaven: It is the smile Faint as a (waning) myth, Faint, and exceeding small On a boy's murdered mouth.

Nothing is bigger than life. There's nothing noble in death. What's noble about never seeing the sunshine again? What's noble about having your legs and arms blown off? What's noble about being an idiot? What's noble about being blind and deaf and dumb? What's noble about being dead?

When life is woe, and hope is dumb, the World says, "Go!" The Grave says, "Come!

I have a natural tendency to feel well about the world, I suppose, one way or another. But then there is the problem of pain. There are things like [Abraham] Lincoln's beloved little boy dying.

...she knew in her heart that nature has a preference for a particular order: parents die, then children die. But it was a harsh design, offering little relief from pain, for being in accord with it means that the fortunate find themselves orphaned.

What greater pain could mortals have than this: To see their children dead before their eyes?