Edna St. Vincent Millay Quotes

There is in this world in which everything wears out, everything perishes, one thing that crumbles into dust, that destroys itself still more completely, leaving behind still fewer traces of itself than Beauty: namely Grief.

Life is full of misery, loneliness, and suffering - and it's all over much too soon.

The beauty of the world, which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.

Nature's first green is gold, Her hardest hue to hold. Her early leaf's a flower; But only so an hour. Then leaf subsides to leaf. So Eden sank to grief, So dawn goes down to day. Nothing gold can stay.

I cried over beautiful things, knowing no beautiful thing lasts.

How many million Aprils came before I ever knew how white a cherry bough could be, a bed of squills, how blue And many a dancing April when life is done with me, will lift the blue flame of the flower and the white flame of the tree Oh burn me with your beauty then, oh hurt me tree and flower, lest in the end death try to take even this glistening hour.

I am dying: it's a beautiful word. Like the long slow sigh of the cello: dying. But the sound of it is the only beautiful thing about it.

Joy and sorrow, beauty and deformity, equally pass away.

Happiness is brief. It will not stay. God batters at its sails.

It took me less than half a lifetime to realize that regret is one of the few guaranteed certainties. Sooner or later everything is touched by it, despite our naive and senseless hope that just this time we will be spared its cold hand on our heart.

In this world, full often, our joys are only the tender shadows which our sorrows cast.

Life itself is offensive and certainly does not apologize - in fact, it hurts considerably and, as we all know, is often very rude and troublesome, just as nature or art can be.

I have lived eighty years of life and know nothing for it, but to be resigned and tell myself that flies are born to be eaten by spiders and man to be devoured by sorrow.

I envy the dead.

Who apart from the gods is without pain for his whole lifetime's length?

I'm dying always.

Death is an art, you know.

There is some suffering that awaits us all.

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

Dying is a tough way to make a living.

Nothing can be grievous that is but once

Even if you live to be a ripe old age, you live long enough to see the people you love pass away.

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.

Who dreamed that beauty passes like a dream?