Walter De La Mare Quotes

What’s your tattoo?” I asked quietly, remembering how my friend noticed he had one. He didn’t say anything for a moment, or ask how I knew, but then he answered, “A decaying snowflake.” I raised my eyebrows. A decaying… “Why?” I asked. “Because of Winter by Walter de la Mare,” he replied softly. “Something still beautiful, even after what I did to her.

The seasonal urge is strong in poets. Milton wrote chiefly in winter. Keats looked for spring to wake him up (as it did in the miraculous months of April and May, 1819). Burns chose autumn. Longfellow liked the month of September. Shelley flourished in the hot months. Some poets, like Wordsworth, have gone outdoors to work. Others, like Auden, keep to the curtained room. Schiller needed the smell of rotten apples about him to make a poem. Tennyson and Walter de la Mare had to smoke. Auden drinks lots of tea, Spender coffee; Hart Crane drank alcohol. Pope, Byron, and William Morris were creative late at night. And so it goes.

God has mercifully ordered that the human brain works slowly; first the blow, hours afterwards the bruise.

After all, what is every man? A horde of ghosts – like a Chinese nest of boxes – oaks that were acorns that were oaks. Death lies behind us, not in front – in our ancestors, back and back until...

Once a man strays out of the common herd, he's more likely to meet wolves in the thickets than angels.

Hi! handsome hunting man Fire your little gun. Bang! Now the animal is dead and dumb and done. Nevermore to peep again, creep again, leap again, Eat or sleep or drink again. Oh, what fun!

A poor old Widow in her weeds Sowed her garden with wild-flower seeds; Not too shallow, and not too deep, And down came April -- drip -- drip -- drip. Up shone May, like gold, and soon Green as an arbour grew leafy June. And now all summer she sits and sews Where willow herb, comfrey, bugloss blows, Teasle and pansy, meadowsweet, Campion, toadflax, and rough hawksbit; Brown bee orchis, and Peals of Bells; Clover, burnet, and thyme she smells; Like Oberon's meadows her garden is Drowsy from dawn to dusk with bees. Weeps she never, but sometimes sighs, And peeps at her garden with bright brown eyes; And all she has is all she needs -- A poor Old Widow in her weeds.

An hour's terror is better than a lifetime of timidity.

As long as I live I shall always be My Self - and no other, Just me.

What a haunting, inescapable riddle life was.

Oh, pity the poor glutton Whose troubles all begin In struggling on and on to turn What's out into what's in.

It was a pity thoughts always ran the easiest way, like water in old ditches.

Poor sleepers should endeavor to compose themselves. Tampering with empty space, stirring up echoes in pitch-black pits of darkness is scarcely sedative. ("Out Of The Deep")

I know well that only the rarest kind of best can be good enough for the young.

He got out of bed and peeped through the blinds. To the east and opposite to him gardens and an apple-orchard lay, and there in strange liquid tranquility hung the morning star, and rose, rilling into the dusk of night the first grey of dawn. The street beneath its autumn leaves was vacant, charmed, deserted.

Yes, after all, this by now was his customary loneliness: there was little else he desired for the present than the hospitality of the dark.

Very old are the woods; And the buds that break Out of the brier's boughs, When March winds wake, So old with their beauty are-- Oh, no man knows Through what wild centuries Roves back the rose.

Now that cleverness was the fashion most people were clever – even perfect fools; and cleverness after all was often only a bore: all head and no body.

His brow is seamed with line and scar; His cheek is red and dark as wine; The fires as of a Northern star Beneath his cap of sable shine. His right hand, bared of leathern glove, Hangs open like an iron gin, You stoop to see his pulses move, To hear the blood sweep out and in. He looks some king, so solitary In earnest thought he seems to stand, As if across a lonely sea He gazed impatient of the land. Out of the noisy centuries The foolish and the fearful fade; Yet burn unquenched these warrior eyes, Time hath not dimmed, nor death dismayed.

In these days of faith-cures, and hypnotism, and telepathy, and subliminalities – why, the simple old world grows very confusing. But rarely, very rarely novel.

The time's gone by for sentiment and all that foolery. Mercy's all very well but after all it's justice that clinches the bargain.

As long as I shall live I shall always be My Self-and no other, Just Me.

Away There is no sorrow Time heals never; No loss, betrayal, Beyond repair. Balm for the soul, then, Though grave shall sever Lover from loved And all they share. See the sweet sun shines The shower is over; Flowers preen their beauty, The day how fair! Brood not too closely On love, on duty; Friends long forgotten May wait you where Life with death Brings all to an issue; None will long mourn for you, Pray for you, miss you, Your place left vacant, You not there.

There was still an hour or two of daylight - even though clouds admitted only a greyish light upon the world, and his Uncle Timothy's house was by nature friendly to gloom. ("Out Of The Deep")

We are *all* we are, and all in a sense we care to dream we are. And for that matter, anything outlandish, bizarre, is a godsend in this rather stodgy life. It is after all just what the old boy said – it's only the impossible that's credible; whatever credible may mean...

When there hasn't been anything there, nothing can be said to have vanished from the place where it has not been. ("Out Of The Deep")

It was to be a day of queer experiences. He had never realized with how many miracles mere everyday life is besieged.

Science, I am told, is making great strides, experimenting, groping after things which no sane man has ever dreamed of before – without being burned alive for it.

Lear, Macbeth. Mercutio – they live on their own as it were. The newspapers are full of them, if we were only the Shakespeares to see it. Have you ever been in a Police Court? Have you ever watched tradesmen behind their counters? My soul, the secrets walking in the streets! You jostle them at every corner. There's a Polonius in every first-class railway carriage, and as many Juliets as there are boarding-schools. ... How inexhaustibly rich everything is, if you only stick to life.

Tell them I came, and no one answered, That I kept my word," he said. Never the least stir made the listeners, Though every word he spake Fell echoing through the shadowiness of the still house From the one man left awake: Ay, they heard his foot upon the stirrup, And the sound of iron on stone, And how the silence surged softly backward, When the plunging hoofs were gone.

It was this mystery, bereft now of all fear, and this beauty together that made life the endless, changing and yet changeless, thing it was. And yet mystery and loveliness alike were really only appreciable with one's legs, as it were, dangling down over into the grave.

I believe in the devil, in the Powers of Darkness, Lawford, as firmly as I believe he and they are powerless – in the long run. They – what shall we say? - have surrendered their intrinsicality. You can just go through evil, as you can go through a sewer, and come out on the other side. A loathsome process too.

Look thy last on all things lovely, Every hour

Marvellous happy it was to be Alone, and yet not solitary. O out of terror and dark, to come In sight of home.

Fancies were all very well for a change, but must be only occasional guests in a world devoted to reality.

Thinking is like a fountain. Once it gets going at a certain pressure, well, it almost impossible to turn it off. And, my hat! what odd things come up with the water! ("Out Of The Deep")

The viewless air seemed to be flocking with hidden listeners. The very clearness and the crystal silence were their ambush. He alone seemed to be the target of cold and hostile scrutiny. There was not a breath to breathe in this crisp, pale sunshine. It was all too rare, too thin. The shadows lay like wings everlastingly folded.

It is very seldom that one encounters what would appear to be sheer unadulterated evil in a human face; an evil, I mean, active, deliberate, deadly, dangerous. Folly, heedlessness, vanity, pride, craft, meanness, stupidity - yes. But even Iagos in this world are few, and devilry is as rare as witchcraft. ("Bad Company")

That's why I've just gone on … collecting this particular kind of stuff – what you might call riff-raff. There's not a book here, Lawford, that hasn't at least a glimmer of the real thing in it – just Life, seen through a living eye, and felt. As for literature, and style, and all that gallimaufry, don't fear for them if your author has the ghost of a hint of genius in his making.

Slim cunning hands at rest, and cozening eyes, Under this stone one loved too wildly lies; How false she was, no granite could declare; Nor all earth's flowers, how fair.

Is there anybody there?" said the Traveller, Knocking on the moonlit door.

When indeed you positively press your face, so to speak, against the crystalline window of your eyes, your mind is apt to become a perfect vacuum. ("Out Of The Deep")

Who said, 'All Time's delight Hath she for narrow bed; Life's troubled bubble broken'? --- That's what I said.

The Listeners 'Is there anybody there?' said the Traveller, Knocking on the moonlit door; And his horse in the silence champed the grasses Of the forest's ferny floor. And a bird flew up out of the turret, Above the Traveller's head: And he smote upon the door again a second time; 'Is there anybody there?' he said. But no one descended to the Traveller; No head from the leaf-fringed sill Leaned over and looked into his grey eyes, Where he stood perplexed and still. But only a host of phantom listeners That dwelt in the lone house then Stood listening in the quiet of the moonlight To that voice from the world of men: Stood thronging the faint moonbeams on the dark stair, That goes down to the empty hall, Hearkening in an air stirred and shaken By the lonely Traveller's call. And he felt in his heart their strangeness, Their stillness answering his cry, While his horse moved, cropping the dark turf, 'Neath the starred and leafy sky; For he suddenly smote on the door, even Louder, and lifted his head:-- 'Tell them I came, and no one answered, That I kept my word,' he said. Never the least stir made the listeners, Though every word he spake Fell echoing through the shadowiness of the still house From the one man left awake: Ay, they heard his foot upon the stirrup, And the sound of iron on stone, And how the silence surged softly backward, When the plunging hoofs were gone.

Lawford had soundlessly stolen a pace or two nearer, and by stopping forward he could, each in turn, scrutinize the little intent company sitting over his story around the lamp at the further end of the table; squatting like little children with their twigs and pins, fishing for wonders on the brink of the unknown.

Acquaintances, after all, are little else than a bad habit.

Look thy last on all things lovely Every hour…

The first of these houses appeared to be occupied. The next two were vacant. Dingy curtains, soot-grey against their snowy window-sills, hung over the next. A litter of paper and refuse-abandoned by the last long gust of wind that must have come whistling round the nearer angle of the house - lay under the broken flight of steps up to a mid-Victorian porch. The small snow clinging to the bricks and to the worn and weathered cement of the wall only added to its gaunt lifelessness. ("Bad Company

Pausing on the threshold, he looked in, conscious not so much of the few familiar sticks of furniture - the trucklebed, the worn strip of Brussels carpet, the chipped blue-banded ewer and basin, the framed illuminated texts on the walls - as of a perfect hive of abhorrent memories. That high cupboard in the corner, from which certain bodiless shapes had been wont to issue and stoop at him cowering out of his dreams; the crab-patterned paper that came alive as you stared; the window cold with menacing stars; the mouseholes, the rusty grate - trumpet of every wind that blows - these objects at once lustily shouted at him in their own original tongues. ("Out Of The Deep")

What’s your tattoo?” I asked quietly, remembering how my friend noticed he had one. He didn’t say anything for a moment, or ask how I knew, but then he answered, “A decaying snowflake.” I raised my eyebrows. A decaying… “Why?” I asked. “Because of Winter by Walter de la Mare,” he replied softly. “Something still beautiful, even after what I did to her.

Unless you were preternaturally busy and preoccupied, you simply couldn't live on and on in a haunted house without being occasionally reminded of its ghosts.

The Night-Swans by Walter De la Mare 'Tis silence on the enchanted lake, And silence in the air serene, Save for the beating of her heart, The lovely-eyed Evangeline. She sings across the waters clear And dark with trees and stars between, The notes her fairy godmother Taught her, the child Evangeline. As might the unrippled pool reply, Faltering an answer far and sweet, Three swans as white as mountain snow Swim mantling to her feet. And still upon the lake they stay, Their eyes black stars in all their snow, And softly, in the glassy pool, Their feet beat darkly to and fro. She rides upon her little boat, Her swans swim through the starry sheen, Rowing her into Fairyland-- The lovely-eyed Evangeline. 'Tis silence on the enchanted lake, And silence in the air serene; Voices shall call in vain again On earth the child Evangeline. 'Evangeline! Evangeline!' Upstairs, downstairs, all in vain. Her room is dim; her flowers faded; She answers not again.

They say death’s a going to bed; I doubt it; but anyhow life’s a long undressing. We came in puling and naked, and every stitch must come off before we get out again. We must stand on our feet in all our Rabelaisian nakedness, and watch the world fade.

And I suffered the streaming light to fall upon me, as I gazed into my joy and triumph with a kind of severe nonchalance. But though my face under my three-cornered hat can have expressed only calmness and resolution, I knew in my heart that my thoughts were merely a thin wisp of smoke above the crater of a suppressed volcano.

Let them enjoy their Eden while they can; though there's plenty of apples, I fear, on the tree yet, Mr Lawford.

After all, what is man but a hoard of ghosts? Oaks, that were acorns, that were oaks...

And it always seems to me,' he went on ruminatingly, 'that, after all, we are nothing better than interlopers on the earth, disfiguring and staining wherever we go.

Dacă în rândul femeilor depresia este cauzată de lipsa de iubire (aceasta este logica), în cazul bărbaților ea se datorează falimentului și pagubelor financiare. Pentru mulți dintre oamenii de afaceri pierderea soției are aceeași însemnătate cu pierderea companiei. În timp ce femeile obișnuiesc să fie competitive una cu alta mai curând pentru ceea ce sunt, majoritatea bărbaților rivalizează pentru ceea ce posedă. Desigur, există și excepții, însă tendința este clară: dacă vrem ca un coleg să se îngălbenească de invidie, nu ne rămâne decât să menționăm, fără a-i acorda totuși prea mare importanță, o ingenioasă investiție în dolari. Invidia îl poate nimici. Nici măcar posedarea vreunui talent special (sportiv, științific, muzical) nu ar fi în stare să producă un asemenea efect: în rândul bărbaților virtuozitatea este admirată și respectată, însă rareori invidiată. Deși ar trebui să suprimăm concurența dintre persoane, dacă aceasta este totuși necesară, atunci ar trebui să preferăm să concurăm prin ceea ce suntem, nu prin ceea ce posedăm. Emanciparea femeii și intrarea acesteia în câmpul muncii au dat naștere unei noi tipologii pe fondul acestei opoziții dintre competitivitate și posesiune: femeia de succes în afaceri. Pentru bărbatul instabil, succesul financiar al perechii sale constituie un adevărat blestem. Unii preferă să fie săraci decât să depindă financiar de parteneră. Alții tind să o eclipseze, să îi pună bețe în roate și/ori să îi disprețuiască meritele, încercând astfel să compenseze cumva lezarea stimei de sine.

Dacă te aventurezi în arena emoțională, nu ai parte întotdeauna de împrejurările psihologice și sociale scontate. Tocmai de aceea bărbații dependenți de aprobarea celor din jur nu sunt dispuși să plătească un preț atât de mare: „Ies mai în câștig dacă îmi reprim emoțiile”. Nu încerc să-l scutesc pe bărbat de responsabilități și nici să caut țapi ispășitori pentru inhibiția emoțională a acestuia; până la urmă, tot bărbatul este acela care trebuie să-și reorganizeze viața afectivă. Vreau doar să pun în evidență un fenomen cât se poate de evident: mulți dintre semenii noștri, bărbați și femei deopotrivă, nu sunt încă pregătiți să accepte un bărbat eliberat din punct de vedere emoțional. Mulți bărbați sunt conștienți de acest lucru și de aceea se împotrivesc schimbării. În rândul bărbaților, teama de a-și da frâu liber sentimentelor pozitive poate fi cu totul ireversibilă. Îmi amintesc de un domn la vreo patruzeci și cinci de ani, foarte preocupat de evoluția sa psihologică și spirituală, dar care nu era în stare să le spună „Te iubesc” părinților lui. Cu toate că se străduia, chiar în clipa în care voia să pronunțe fraza picioarele începeau să-i tremure și un soi de convulsie îi bloca confesunea. Chiar și privirea i se tulbura, încețoșată de lacrimi, și nu reușea deloc să articuleze vreun cuvânt. Mulți dintre pacienții mei de sex masculin și-ar putea îmbunătăți considerabil relațiile, atât pe aceea de cuplu, cât și contactele cu persoanele din jur, dacă ar reuși să comunice și să emită remarci pozitive (...). Faimosul și mult râvnitul „Te iubesc” se remarcă mai curând prin absență. Scuza bărbatului este mereu aceeași: „Nu e genul meu să spun așa ceva”, „Mă simt ridicol”, „Mă simt de parcă aș fi un personaj de telenovelă”, „La mine în familie nu se obișnuia să se spună așa ceva”, „La ce bun?” și altele asemenea.

Long after they had bidden each other good-night, long after Herbert had trodden on tiptoe with his candle past his closed door, Lawford sat leaning on his arms at the open window, staring out across the motionless moonlit trees that seemed to stand like draped and dreaming pilgrims, come to the peace of their Nirvana at last beside the crashing music of the waters. And he himself, the self that never sleeps beneath the tides and waves og consciousness, was listening, too, almost as unmovedly and unheedingly to the thoughts that clashed in conflict through his brain.

Men whose constant companion was death needed women in a way most men couldn't understand.

sounds as faint as the vanishing remembrance of voices in a dream

What is called realism is usually a record of life at a low pitch and ebb viewed in the sunless light of day.

Could I not hear the silken rustle of the evening primrose unfolding her petals? Soon the cool dews would be falling on the stones where I was wont to sit in reverie beside the flowing water. It seemed indeed that my self had slipped from my body, and hovered entranced amid the thousand jargonings of its tangled lullaby. Was there, in truth, a wraith in me that could so steal out; and were the invisible inhabitants in their fortresses beside my stream conscious of its presence among them, and as happy in my spectral company as I in theirs?

Faintly out of the frosty air was wafted the knelling of midnight. I rose, stepped back from the firelight, drew the curtain, and stole a look into space. Away on the right flashed Sirius, and to east of him came gliding flat-headed Hydra with Alphard, the Red Bird, in his coil. So, for a moment in our history, I and the terrestrial globe were alone together. It seemed indeed that an intenser silence drew over reality as the earth faced yet one more fleeting revolution round her invisible lord and master. But no moon was risen yet.

Time's sands had been trickling fast while I thought these small thoughts that bright spring daybreak. So, though we had loitered on our way, it seemed we had reached our destination on the wings of the morning. Alas, Mrs Bowater's smile can have been only skin-deep; for, when, lifting my eyes from the ground I stopped all of a sudden, spread out my hands, and cried in triumph, "There! Mrs Bowater"; she hardly shared my rapture. She disapproved of the vast, blank "barn of a place," with its blackshot windows and cold chimneys. The waste and ruination of the garden displeased her so much that I grew a little ashamed of my barbarism. "It's all going to wrack and ruin," she exclaimed, snorting at my stone summer-house no less emphatically than she had snorted at Mrs Monnerie. "Not a walkable walk, nor the trace of a border; and was there ever such a miggle-maggle of weeds! A fine house in its prime, miss, but now, money melting away like butter in the sun." "But," said I, standing before her in the lovely light amid the dwelling dewdrops, "really and truly, Mrs Bowater, it is only going back to its own again. What you call a miggle-maggle is what these things were made to be. They are growing up now by themselves; and if you could look as close as I can, you'd see they breathe only what each can spare. They are just racing along to live as wildly as they possibly can. It's the tameness," I expostulated, flinging back my hood, "that would be shocking to me.

It seemed to my young mind that there was not a day, scarcely an hour, I lived, but that Life was unfolding itself in ever new and ravishing disguises. I had not begun to be in the least tired or afraid of it. Smallest of bubbles I might be, tossing on the great waters, but I reflected the universe.

And now, darkness being spread over the garden, in the east the moon was rising. Moreover, a curious sight met my eyes; for as the storm settled, heavy rain in travelling showers was still occasionally skirting the house; and when, between the heaped-up masses of cloud, the distant lightning gleamed a faint vaporous lilac, I saw motionless in the air, and as if suspended in their falling between earth and sky, the multitudinous glass-clear, pear-shaped drops of water. At sight of these jewels thus crystalling the dark air I was filled with such a rapture that I actually clapped my hands. And presently the moon herself appeared, as if to be my companion. Serene, remote, she glided at last from cover of an enormous bluff of cloud into the faint-starred vault of space, seemed to pause for an instant in contemplation of the dark scene, then went musing on her way. Beneath her silver all seemed at peace, and it was then that I fell asleep.

Love! I detest the very sound of the word. What has it ever meant to me, I should like to know, in this—this cage?" "Scarcely a streak of gilding on the bars,

You and the quiet sky—I wish I had never gone away. What is the use of being one's self, if one is always changing?

It was as if the past were surrounded with a great wall; and the future clear and hard as glass. You might explore the past in memory: you couldn't scale its invisible walls.

Yet part for honesty and part for shame, I had remained silent. I could only comfort myself with remembering that we should soon meet again, and that the future might be kinder. Well, sometimes the future is kinder, but it is never the same thing as the past.

In his classic study Elegant Nightmares: The English Ghost Story from LeFanu to Blackwood, the American scholar Jack Sullivan divides traditional tales of the supernatural into two camps: the antiquarian and the visionary. The former is typified by a certain emotional detachment, coupled with subtle irony and a dry, precise evocation of a world that is recognizably our own, inhabited by sensible characters—male Edwardian antiquaries whose stolidity borders on dullness, and whose invocation of horrors is as inadvertent as it is irrevocable. The antiquarian ghost story is typified by the work of the English don M. R. (Montague Rhodes) James, himself inspired by the more open-ended horror of his Irish predecessor, Sheridan LeFanu. As Sullivan puts it, “For LeFanu’s characters, reality is inherently dark and deadly; for James’ antiquaries, darkness must be sought out through research and discovery.” The visionary ghost story, in contract, has more in common with the robust stream of American transcendentalism that emerged in the late 19th century, as well as with the hermetic and decadent artistic movements popular in fin de siècle Europe. Little surprise, then, that one of the most successful visionary writers, the British-born Algernon Blackwood, based his most rapturous and terrifying tales on his experiences in the Canadian wilderness, or that the other great supernatural visionary, the Welsh Arthur Machen, was a friend of Arthur Edward Waite, a member of the Order of the Golden Dawn, and drew upon Celtic myth in his short fiction. Sullivan identified a later, third stream in supernatural writing in Lost Souls, the companion volume to Elegant Nightmares: he simply calls it the contemporary ghost story, a capacious portmanteau term that makes room for writers such as Robert Aickman, Walter de la Mare, Elizabeth Bowen and Ramsey Campbell. To this list I’d add Peter Straub, Kelly Link, Glen Hirshberg, and now, with the publication of Mr. Gaunt and Other Uneasy Encounters, John Langan.