All Quotes by Stephen Spender
“Since we are what we are, what shall we be The light, and then resign it for the grave.”
“Great poetry is always written by somebody straining to go beyond what he can do.”
“I simply had to get there.”
“There is a certain justice in criticism. The critic is like a midwife — a tyrannical midwife.”
“When a child, my dreams rode on your wishes,Of your rhetoric, windy of course.”
“I'm struggling at the end to get out of the valley of hectoring youth, journalistic middle age, imposture, moneymaking, public relations, bad writing, mental confusion.”
“History is the ship carrying living memories to the future.”
“I say, stamping the words with emphasis, Drink from here energy and only energy”
“Eye, gazelle, delicate wanderer, Touch, love, all senses...”
“No one Our goal which we compel: Man shall be man.”
“Death to the killers, bringing light to life.”
“After the first powerful plain manifestoBut gliding like a queen, she leaves the station.”
“Ah, like a comet through flame she moves entrancedBreaking with honey buds, shall ever equal.”
“Death is another milestone on their way. How this one excelled all others in making driving belts.”
“They think how one life hums, revolves and toils, One cog in a golden singing hive...”
“What I had not foreseen Leaking the brightness away”
“For I had expected always To save from dust”
“Across this dazzling They sign: 'I AM!'”
“In railway halls, on pavements near the traffic, As tides push rotten stuff along the shore.”
“Paint here no draped despairs, no saddening clouds This Time forgets and never heals, far less transcends.”
“At dawn she lay with her profile at that angle Which, when she sleeps, seems the carved face of an angel.”
“I think continually of those who were truly great. Should tell of the spirit clothed from head to foot in song.”
“What is precious is never to forget With noise and fog the flowering of the spirit.”
“Near the snow, near the sun, in the highest fields, And left the vivid air signed with their honour.”
“More beautiful and soft than any moth Scarcely disturbing charted currents of air.”
“In the last sweep of love, they pass over fields But soon are hid under the loud city.”
“Then, as they land, they hear the tolling bell Religion stands, the church blocking the sun.”
“Our single purpose was to walk through snowLike compass iron.”
“Extensive whiteness drownedStatic, glaring days, Time's suspended blank.”
“What the eye delights in, no longer dictatesOn the horizon's rim: they sign their peace, in games.”
“There was a wood,I entered with myself. I left with a woman.”
“History has tonguesBalancing present sky.”
“The laurelled exiles, kneeling to kiss these sands. Read books as though he broke up flints.”
“One, a poet, went babbling like a fountainExposed to a too violent sun.”
“Let your ghost follow ever a bride:”
“Whatever happens, I shall never be alone, I shall always have a fare, an affair, or a revolution.”
“Of course, the entire effort is to put myselfIn the outer suburbs. Well, well, I carry on.”
“Yet supposing that a bomb should diveWhich is all mystery or nothing.”
“You drive the landscape like a herd of cloudsBy one glance carrying all these eyes.”
“Deep in the winter plain, two armiesOn either side, except the dead, and wounded.”
“All have become so nervous and so coldWhich brought him here, more terribly than bullets.”
“The guns spell money's ultimate reasonHe was a better target for a kiss.”
“His name never appeared in the papers.rumour, drifted outside.”
“Consider his life which was valuelessLying under the olive tree, O world, O death?”
“Under the olive trees, from the groundRaging with flags on the world's shore.”
“Your heart was loaded with its fate like leadWhich cut their lands and killed their men.”
“Your quicksilver declaiming eye Which thickened into Allies.”
“To break out of the chaos of my darknessOut of my darkness into a lucid day.”
“My words like eyes that flinch from light, refuseOn a circumference to avoid the centre.”
“The iron arc of the avoiding journeyCentre and circumference are both my weakness.”
“My single pair of eyesWhere I reflect the many, in my one.”
“And if this I were destroyed,Closing, they shut me in a coffin.”
“Here where I lie is the hot pitIn double sorrow.”
“I wear your kiss like a featherLaid upon my cheek”
“And then the heart in its white sailing prideLife, waiting for all your life to speak.”
“Involved in my own entrails and a crustOne of a universe of stars and faces.”
“The seen and seeing softly mutually strikeAt the back of love, the back of air, the back of light.”
“You stared out of the window on the emptinessWho sees for the first time things happen.”
“When you smiled,Where it had always been silverly carried.”
“All the posters on the walls In the victorious hurricane.”
“Far far from gusty waves these children's faces. Like rootless weeds the torn hair round their paleness.”
“Surely, Shakespeare is wicked and the map a bad example So blot their maps with slums as big as doom.”
“Unless, governor, teacher, inspector, visitor, History is theirs whose language is the sun.”