Matthew Arnold Quotes

A fiance is neither this nor that: he's left one shore, but not yet reached the other.

I was born wandering between two worlds, one dead, the other powerless to be born, and have made, in a curious way, the worst of both.

Between two worlds life hovers like a star, twixt night and morn, upon the horizon's verge.

I began writing 'The Cold Song' in the months following my father's death, when I felt this sense of loss, disappearance, of being right in the middle of life and wondering: 'What now? How to proceed?'

I still just sort of live my life the way that I was before. I don't know when I will feel that it's different.

The beginning of the end can feel a lot like the middle when you are living in it.

There was not a moving up into vacated places; there was simply an anachronistic staying on between a vanishing past and an incalculable future.

When you are not happy where you are, and you are not quite sure if you want to leave or how to leave, you are in the meantime. Its a state of limbo. You are hanging on, ready to let go, afraid to fall, not wanting to hurt yourself, afraid you will hurt someone else. In the meantime, you pray the other person will let go first so that you will not feel guilty.

At the violet hour, when the eyes and back Turn upward from the desk, when the human engine waits Like a taxi throbbing waiting I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives.

And there is a chance that everything we did was incorrect, but stasis is itself criminal for those with the means to move, and the means to weave communion between people.

But now the world, he thought, had taken them. He knew that this could suddenly happen. One day you just woke up, and there was somewhere that you needed to be.

This is how a man looks when he's deciding that the risk of death is better than the risk of change.

All major changes are like death. You can't see to the other side until you are there.

The old is dying and the new cannot be born. In this interregnum there arises a great diversity of morbid symptoms.

Whenever my life came to a halt, the questions would arise: Why? And what next?

Death was past, life not come: so he waited.

It is always wiser, where there is a choice, to trust inertia. It is the greatest force in the world.

There's a part of all of us whose impulse is to say, "Let's keep everything the same until I die and then you can do whatever you want afterward." And that's a difficult part.

I'm trying to keep up with what's happening in this turbulent world.

The problem with putting it all on the line is that it might not work out. The problem with not putting it all on the line is that it will never (ever) change things for the better. Not much of a choice, I think.

You're in a terrible spot. It's too late for you to retreat but too soon to act. All you can do is witness. You're in the miserable position of an infant who cannot return to the mother's womb, but neither can he run around and act. All an infant can do is witness and listen to the stupendous tales of action being told to him. You are at that precise point now. You cannot go back to the womb of your old world, but you cannot act with power either. For you there is only witnessing acts of power and listening to tales of power.

The real risk is doing nothing.

I must confess that I lost faith in the sanity of the world

Halfway down the stairs, is a stair, where I sit. There isn't any, other stair, quite like, it. I'm not at the bottom, I'm not at the top; So this is the stair, where, I always, stop. Halfway up the stairs, isn't up, and isn't down. It isn't in the nursery, it isn't in the town. And all sorts of funny thoughts, run round my head: It isn't really anywhere! It's somewhere else instead!

You are afraid to die, and you’re afraid to live. What a way to exist.