quotes

My friend has, of all things, asked me to find a quote to be engraved on her iPod. While brainstorming, I decided to look through my database of favourite quotes/poems.

Yeats

"Let us go forth, the tellers of tales, and seize whatever prey the heart long for, and have no fear. Everything exists, everything is true, and the earth is only a little dust under our feet."

Favourite part from one of my favourite poems:

"How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face..."

Another extract from beloved Yeats:

"Nor law, nor duty bade me fight
Nor public men, nor cheering crowds,
A lonely impulse of delight
Drove to this tumult in the clouds;
I balanced all, brought all to mind,
The years to come seemed waste of breath,
A waste of breath the years behind
In balance with this life, this death."

Tolkien & LOTR

"Out of doubt, out of dark to the day's rising
I came singing in the sun, sword unsheating.
To hope's end I rode and to heart's breaking:
Now for wrath, now for ruin and a red nightfall!"

"And long there he lay, an image of the splendour of the Kings of Men in glory undimmed before the breaking of the world.

But Arwen went forth from the House, and the light of her eyes was quenched, and it seemed to her people that she had become cold and grey as nightfall in winter that comes without a star. Then she said farewell to Eldarion, and to her daughters, and to all whom she had loved; and she went out from the city of Minas Tirith and passed away to the land of Lórien, and dwelt there along under the fading trees until winter came. Galadriel had passed away and Celeborn also was gone, and the land was silent.

There at last when the mallorn-leaves were falling, but spring had not yet come, she laid herself to rest upon Cerin Amroth; and there is her green grave, until the world is changed, and all the days of her life are utterly forgotten by men that come after, and elanor and niphredil bloom no more east of the Sea.

Here ends this tale, as it has come to us from the South; and with the passing of Evenstar no more is said in this book of the days of old."

On Hamlet

"The world has grown sad because a puppet was once melancholy."

- Oscar Wilde

"In this sense, the Dionysian man resembles Hamlet: both have once looked truly into the essence of things, they have gained knowledge, and nausea inhibits action; for their action could not change anything in the eternal nature of things; they feel it to be ridiculous or humilitating that they should be asked to set right a world that is out of joint. Knowledge kills action; action requires the viels of illusion: that is the doctrine of Hamlet, not that cheap wisdom of Jack the Dreamer who reflects too much... Not reflection, no - true knowledge, an insight into the horrible truth, outweighs any motive for action, both in Hamlet and in the Dionysian man."
- Nietzsche


Misc.

"the quasi-miraculous fact that once, on this earth... walked other men and women, as actual as we are today, thinking their own thoughts, swayed by their own passions, but now all gone, one generation vanishing after another, gone as utterly as we ourselves shall shortly be gone like ghosts at cockcrow"
-G.M. Trevelyan

"The silver swan, who living had no note,
When death approached unlocked her silent throat;
Leaving her breast against the reedy shore,
Thus sung her first and last, and sung no more:
Farewell all joys; O death, come close mine eyes;
More geese than swans now live, more fools than wise."
- Orlando Gibbons

A particularly cruel and honest poem:

"People expect old men to die,
They do not really mourn old men.
Old men are different. People look
At them with eyes that wonder when...
People watch with unshocked eyes;
But the old men know when an old man dies."
- Ogden Nash