In whose blent air all our compulsions meet, Are recognised, and robed as destinies.
‘Church Going’ (1955)
What are days for? Days are where we live.
They come, they wake us Time and time over. They are to be happy in:
Where can we live but days?
‘Days’ (1964)
Life is first boredom, then fear. Whether or not we use it, it goes,
And leaves what something hidden from us chose, And age, and then the only end of age.
‘Dockery & Son’ (1964)
Rather than words comes the thought of high windows: The sun-comprehending glass,
And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.
‘High Windows’ (1974)
Next year we are to bring the soldiers home For lack of money, and it is all right. Places they guarded, or kept orderly,
Must guard themselves, and keep themselves orderly.
‘Homage to a Government’ (1974)
Next year we shall be living in a country
That brought its soldiers home for lack of money. The statues will be standing in the same Tree-muffled squares, and look nearly the same. Our children will not know it’s a different country. All we can hope to leave them now is money.
‘Homage to a Government’ (1974)
Nothing, like something, happens anywhere.
‘I Remember, I Remember’ (1955)
Never such innocence, Never before or since, As changed itself to past Without a word—the men
Leaving the gardens tidy, The thousands of marriages Lasting a little while longer: Never such innocence again.
‘MCMXIV’ (1964)
Perhaps being old is having lighted rooms Inside your head, and people in them, acting. People you know, yet can’t quite name.
‘The Old Fools’ (1974)
Don’t read too much now: the dude Who lets the girl down before
The hero arrives, the chap
Who’s yellow and keeps the store, Seem far too familiar. Get stewed: Books are a load of crap.
‘Study of Reading Habits’ (1964)
They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do. They fill you with the faults they had And add some extra, just for you.
‘This Be The Verse’ (1974)
Man hands on misery to man. It deepens like a coastal shelf. Get out as early as you can,
And don’t have any kids yourself.
‘This Be The Verse’ (1974)
Why should I let the toad work Squat on my life?
Can’t I use my wit as a pitchfork And drive the brute off?
Six days of the week it soils With its sickening poison— Just for paying a few bills!
That’s out of proportion.
‘Toads’ (1955)
Give me your arm, old toad; Help me down Cemetery Road.
‘Toads Revisited’ (1964)
I thought of London spread out in the sun,
Its postal districts packed like squares of wheat.
‘The Whitsun Weddings’ (1964)
A beginning, a muddle, and an end.
‘New Fiction’ no. 15, January 1978 (the ‘classic formula’ for a novel)
Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth.
‘Required Writing’ (1983) p. 47
12.28 Duc de la Rochefoucauld 1613-80
Nous avons tous assez de force pour supporter les maux d’autrui.
We are all strong enough to bear the misfortunes of others.
‘Maximes’ (1678) no. 19
Il est plus honteux de se dèfier de ses amis que d’en être trompè
It is more shameful to spurn one’s friends than to be duped by them.
‘Maximes’ (1678) no. 84
Il y a de bons mariages, mais il n’y en a point de dèlicieux.
There are good marriages, but no delightful ones.
‘Maximes’ (1678) no. 113
L’hypocrisie est un hommage que le vice rend á la vertu.
Hypocrisy is a tribute which vice pays to virtue.
‘Maximes’ (1678) no. 218
C’est une grande habiletè que de savoir cacher son habiletè.
The height of cleverness is to be able to conceal it.
‘Maximes’ (1678) no. 245
Il n’y a guére d’homme assez habile pour connaître tout le mal qu’il fait.
There is scarcely a single man sufficiently aware to know all the evil he does.
‘Maximes’ (1678) no. 269
L’absence diminue les mèdiocres passions, et augmente les grandes, comme le vent èteint les bougies, et allume le feu.
Absence diminishes commonplace passions and increases great ones, as the wind extinguishes
candles and kindles fire.
‘Maximes’ (1678) no. 276.
La reconnaissance de la plupart des hommes n’est qu’une secréte envie de recevoir de plus grands bienfaits.
In most of mankind gratitude is merely a secret hope for greater favours.
‘Maximes’ (1678) no. 298
L’accent du pays oû l’on est nè demeure dans l’esprit et dans le coeur comme dans le langage.
The accent of one’s birthplace lingers in the mind and in the heart as it does in one’s speech.
‘Maximes’ (1678) no. 342
On n’est jamais si malheureux qu’on croit, ni si heureux qu’on espére.
One is never as unhappy as one thinks, nor as happy as one hopes.
‘Sentences et Maximes de Morale’ (Dutch edition, 1664) maxim 128
12.29 Duc de la Rochefoucauld-Liancourt 1747-1827
Louis XVI: C’est une grande rèvolte.
La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt: Non, Sire, c’est une grande rèvolution.
‘It is a big revolt.’ ‘No, Sir, a big revolution.’
On the Fall of the Bastille being reported at Versailles, 1789, in F. Dreyfus ‘La RochefoucauldLiancourt’ (1903) ch. 2, sect. 3
12.30 Hugh Latimer c.1485-1555
Gutta cavat lapidem, non vi sed saepe cadendo.
The drop of rain maketh a hole in the stone, not by violence, but by oft falling.
Sermon preached 19 April 1549, in ‘The Second Sermon preached before the King’s Majesty’ (1549).
Be of good comfort Master Ridley, and play the man. We shall this day light such a candle by God’s grace in England, as (I trust) shall never be put out.
On being burned for heresy, 16 October 1555, in John Foxe ‘Actes and Monuments’ (1570 ed.) p. 1937
12.31 William Laud 1573-1645
Lord I am coming as fast as I can, I know I must pass through the shadow of death, before I can come to see thee; But it is but Umbra Mortis, a mere shadow of death, a little darkness upon nature; but thou by thy merits and passion, hast broke through the jaws of death; the Lord receive my soul, and have mercy upon me, and bless this kingdom with peace and plenty, and with brotherly love and charity, that there may not be this effusion of Christian blood amongst them, for Jesus Christ his sake, if it be thy will.
Prayer at the scaffold, in Peter Heylin ‘Cyprianus Anglicus’ (1668) p. 537
12.32 Sir Harry Lauder 1870-1950
Keep right on to the end of the road, Keep right on to the end.
Tho’ the way be long, let your heart be strong, Keep right on round the bend.
Tho’ you’re tired and weary, Still journey on
Till you come to your happy abode,
Where all you love you’ve been dreaming of Will be there at the end of the road.
‘The End of the Road’ (1924 song)
I love a lassie, a bonnie, bonnie lassie, She’s as pure as the lily in the dell.
She’s as sweet as the heather, the bonnie bloomin’ heather— Mary, ma Scotch Bluebell.
‘I Love a Lassie’ (1905 song)
Roamin’ in the gloamin’,
On the bonnie banks o’ Clyde. Roamin’ in the gloamin’ Wae my lassie by my side.
‘Roamin’ in the Gloamin’’ (1911 song)
See also R. F. Morrison (1.179) in Volume II
12.33 Stan Laurel (Arthur Stanley Jefferson) 1890-1965
Another nice mess you’ve gotten me into.
‘Another Fine Mess’ (1930 film) and many other Laurel and Hardy films; spoken by Oliver Hardy
12.34 William L. Laurence 1888-1977
At first it was a giant column that soon took the shape of a supramundane mushroom.
On the first atomic explosion in New Mexico, 16 July 1945; in ‘New York Times’ 26 September 1945
12.35 James Laver 1899-1975
The same costume will be
Indecent
...
10 years before its time
Shameless ...
5 years before its time
Outrè (daring)
...
1 year before its time
Smart
Dowdy
...
1 year after its time
Hideous
...
10 years after its time
Ridiculous ...
20 years after its time
Amusing
...
30 years after its time
Quaint
...
50 years after its time
Charming ...
70 years after its time
Romantic ...
100 years after its time
Beautiful ...
150 years after its time
‘Taste and Fashion’ (1937) ch. 18
12.36Andrew Bonar Law 1858-1923
See Bonar Law (2.149)
12.37D. H. Lawrence (David Herbert Lawrence) 1885-1930
To the Puritan all things are impure, as somebody says.
‘Etruscan Places’ (1932) ‘Cerveteri’
Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically.
‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’ (1928) ch. 1
John Thomas says good-night to Lady Jane, a little droopingly, but with a hopeful heart.
‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’ (1928) ch. 19
And here lies the vast importance of the novel, properly handled. It can inform and lead into new places the flow of our sympathetic consciousness and it can lead our sympathy away in recoil from things gone dead.
‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’ (1928) ch. 9
The English...are paralysed by fear. That is what thwarts and distorts the Anglo-Saxon existence. It...seemed to dig in to the English soul at the time of the Renaissance. Nothing could be more lovely and fearless than Chaucer. But already Shakespeare is morbid with fear, fear of consequences. That is the strange phenomenon of the English Renaissance: this mystic terror of the consequences, the consequences of action.
‘Phoenix’ (1936) ‘An Introduction to these Paintings’
If you try to nail anything down in the novel, either it kills the novel, or the novel gets up and walks away with the nail.
‘Phoenix’ (1936) ‘Morality and the Novel’
Pornography is the attempt to insult sex, to do dirt on it.
‘Phoenix’ (1936) ‘Pornography and Obscenity’ ch. 3
In life...no new thing has ever arisen, or can arise, save out of the impulse of the male upon the female, the female upon the male. The interaction of the male and female spirit begot the wheel, the plough, and the first utterance that was made on the face of the earth.
‘Phoenix’ (1936) ‘Study of Thomas Hardy’ ch. 7
The novel is the one bright book of life.
‘Phoenix’ (1936) ‘Why the novel matters’
Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper function of a critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.
‘Studies in Classic American Literature’ (1923) ch. 1
Be a good animal, true to your instincts.
‘The White Peacock’ (1911) pt. 2, ch. 2
Don’t you find it a beautiful clean thought, a world empty of people, just uninterrupted grass, and a hare sitting up?
‘Women in Love’ (1920) ch. 11
The Forsytes are all parasites...parasites upon the thoughts, the feelings, the whole body of life of really living individuals who have gone before them and who live alongside them. All they can do, having no individual life of their own, is out of fear to rake together property.
xxx
Is it the secret of the long-nosed Etruscans?
The long-nosed, sensitive-footed, subtly-smiling Etruscans Who made so little noise outside the cypress groves?
‘Cypresses’ (1923)
Don’t be sucked in by the su-superior, don’t swallow the culture bait,
don’t drink, don’t drink and get beerier and beerier, do learn to discriminate.
‘Don’ts’ (1929)
Along the avenue of cypresses
All in their scarlet cloaks, and surplices Of linen go the chanting choristers,
The priests in gold and black, the villagers.
‘Giorno dei Morti’ (1917)
How beastly the bourgeois is Especially the male of the species.
‘How Beastly the Bourgeois Is’ (1929)
For while we have sex in the mind, we truly have none in the body.
‘Leave Sex Alone’ (1929)
Men! The only animal in the world to fear!
‘Mountain Lion’ (1923)
So now it is vain for the singer to burst into clamour With the great black piano appassionato. The glamour Of childish days is upon me, my manhood is cast
Down in the flood of remembrance, I weep like a child for the past.
‘Piano’ (1918)
I never saw a wild thing Sorry for itself.
‘Self-Pity’ (1929)
Now it is autumn and the falling fruit And the long journey towards oblivion...
Have you built your ship of death, O have you? O build your ship of death, for you will need it.
‘Ship of Death’ (1932)
A snake came to my water-trough
On a hot, hot day, and I in pyjamas for the heat, To drink there.
‘Snake’ (1923)
And I thought of the albatross,
And I wished he would come back, my snake. For he seemed to me again like a king,
Like a king in exile, uncrowned in the underworld, Now due to be crowned again.
And so, I missed my chance with one of the lords Of life.
And I have something to expiate: A pettiness.
‘Snake’ (1923)
Not I, not I, but the wind that blows through me! A fine wind is blowing the new direction of Time.
‘Song of a Man who has Come Through’ (1917)
When I read Shakespeare I am struck with wonder That such trivial people should muse and thunder In such lovely language.
‘When I Read Shakespeare’ (1929)
Curse the blasted, jelly-boned swines, the slimy, the belly-wriggling invertebrates, the miserable sodding rotters, the flaming sods, the snivelling, dribbling, dithering, palsied, pulse-less lot that make up England today. They’ve got white of egg in their veins, and their spunk is that watery it’s a marvel they can breed. They can nothing but frog-spawn—the gibberers! God, how I hate them!
Letter to Edward Garnett, 3 July 1912, in H. T. Moore (ed.) ‘Collected Letters of D. H. Lawrence’ (1962) vol. 1
Tragedy ought really to be a great kick at misery.
Letter to A. W. McLeod, 6 October 1912, in H. T. Moore (ed.) ‘Collected Letters of D. H. Lawrence’ (1962) vol. 1
I like to write when I feel spiteful; it’s like having a good sneeze.
Letter to Lady Cynthia Asquith, c.25 November 1913, in H. T. Moore (ed.) ‘Collected Letters of D. H. Lawrence’ (1962) vol. 1
The dead don’t die. They look on and help.
Letter to J. Middleton Murry, 2 February 1923, in H. T. Moore (ed.) ‘Collected Letters of D. H. Lawrence’ (1962) vol. 2
The autumn always gets me badly, as it breaks into colours. I want to go south, where there is no autumn, where the cold doesn’t crouch over one like a snow-leopard waiting to pounce. The heart of the North is dead, and the fingers of cold are corpse fingers.
Letter to J. Middleton Murry, 3 October 1924, in H. T. Moore (ed.) ‘Collected Letters of D. H. Lawrence’ (1962) vol. 2
I’d like to write an essay on [Arnold] Bennett—sort of pig in clover.
Letter to Aldous Huxley, 27 March 1928, in H. T. Moore (ed.) ‘Collected Letters of D. H. Lawrence’ (1962) vol. 2
My God, what a clumsy olla putrida James Joyce is! Nothing but old fags and cabbage-stumps of quotations from the Bible and the rest, stewed in the juice of deliberate, journalistic dirtymindedness.
Letter to Aldous and Maria Huxley, 15 August 1928, in H. T. Moore (ed.) ‘Collected Letters of D. H. Lawrence’ (1962) vol. 2
12.38 T. E. Lawrence 1888-1935
Many men would take the death-sentence without a whimper to escape the life-sentence which fate carries in her other hand.
‘The Mint’ (1955) pt. 1, ch. 4
The trumpets came out brazenly with the last post. We all swallowed our spittle, chokingly, while our eyes smarted against our wills. A man hates to be moved to folly by a noise.
‘The Mint’ (1955) pt. 3, ch. 9
I loved you, so I drew these tides of men into my hands and wrote my will across the sky in stars
To earn you freedom, the seven pillared worthy house, that your eyes might be shining for me When we came.
‘The Seven Pillars of Wisdom’ (1926) dedication
12.39 Emma Lazarus 1849-87
Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore, Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me: I lift my lamp beside the golden door.
‘The New Colossus’ (inscription on the Statue of Liberty, New York)
12.40 Sir Edmund Leach 1910—
Far from being the basis of the good society, the family, with its narrow privacy and tawdry secrets, is the source of all our discontents.
BBC Reith Lectures, 1967, in ‘Listener’ 30 November 1967
12.41 Stephen Leacock 1869-1944
I am what is called a professor emeritus—from the Latin e, ‘out’, and meritus, ‘so he ought to be’.
‘Here are my Lectures’ (1938) ch. 14
The landlady of a boarding-house is a parallelogram—that is, an oblong figure, which cannot be described, but which is equal to anything.
There are no handles to a horse, but the 1910 model has a string to each side of its face for turning its head when there is anything you want it to see.
‘Literary Lapses’ (1910) ‘Reflections on Riding’
A sportsman is a man who, every now and then, simply has to get out and kill something. Not that he’s cruel. He wouldn’t hurt a fly. It’s not big enough.
‘My Remarkable Uncle’ (1942) p. 73
Lord Ronald said nothing; he flung himself from the room, flung himself upon his horse and
rode madly off in all directions.
‘Nonsense Novels’ (1911) ‘Gertrude the Governess’
A decision of the courts decided that the game of golf may be played on Sunday, not being a game within the view of the law, but being a form of moral effort.
‘Over the Footlights’ (1923) ‘Why I Refuse to Play Golf’
12.42 Mary Leapor 1722-46
In spite of all romantic poets sing,
This gold, my dearest, is an useful thing.
‘Mira to Octavia’ (1748)
Woman, a pleasing but a short-lived flower, Too soft for business and too weak for power: A wife in bondage, or neglected maid: Despised, if ugly; if she’s fair, betrayed.
‘An Essay on Woman’ (1751)
12.43 Edward Lear 1812-88
Who, or why, or which, or what, Is the Akond of Swat?
‘The Akond of Swat’ (1888)
On the coast of Coromandel Where the early pumpkins blow, In the middle of the woods, Lived the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bó.
Two old chairs, and half a candle;— One old jug without a handle,— These were all his worldly goods.
‘The Courtship of the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bó’ (1871)
When awful darkness and silence reign Over the great Gromboolian plain, Through the long, long wintry nights, When the angry breakers roar
As they beat on the rocky shore;—
When storm-clouds brood on the towering heights Of the Hills of the Chankly Bore.
‘The Dong with a Luminous Nose’ (1871)
And those who watch at that midnight hour From Hall or Terrace or lofty Tower,
Cry as the wild light passes along,— ‘The Dong!—the Dong!
