Thomas Bailey Aldrich Quotes
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I beg you come tonight and dine A welcome waits you and sound wine The Roederer chilly to a charm As Juno's breasts the claret warm.
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The man who suspects his own tediousness is yet to be born.
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Decoration Day is the most beautiful of our national holidays.... The grim cannon have turned into palm branches, and the shell and shrapnel into peach blossoms.
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Great orators who are not also great writers become very indistinct shadows to the generations following them. The spell vanishes with the voice.
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Sorrow itself is not so hard to bear As the thought of sorrow coming. Airy ghosts, That work no harm, do terrify us more Than men in steel with bloody purposes. Death is not dreadful; 'tis the dread of death— We die whene'er we think of it!
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The ring of a false coin is not more recognizable than that of a rhyme setting forth a false sorrow.
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They fail, and they alone, who have not striven.
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True art selects and paraphrases, but seldom gives a verbatim translation.
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October turned my maple's leaves to gold; The most are gone now; here and there one lingers: Soon these will slip from the twigs' weak hold, Like coins between a dying miser's fingers.
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The possession of gold has ruined fewer men than the lack of it. What noble enterprises have been checked and what fine souls have been blighted in the gloom of poverty the world will never know.
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But I, in the chilling twilight stand and wait At the portcullis, at thy castle gate, Longing to see the charmed door of dreams Turn on its noiseless hinges, delicate sleep!
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It were better to be a soldier's widow than a coward's wife.
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Though I be shut in darkness, and become insentient dust blown idly here and there, I count oblivion a scant price to pay for having once had held against my lip life's brimming cup of hydromel and rue--for having once known woman's holy love and a child's kiss, and for a little space been boon companion to the Day and Night, Fed on the odors of the summer dawn, and folded in the beauty of the stars. Dear Lord, though I be changed to senseless clay, and serve the potter as he turns his wheel, I thank Thee for the gracious gift of tears!
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A glance, a word -- and joy or pain befalls.... How slight the links are in the chain that binds us to our destiny!
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Day is a snow-white Dove of heaven That from the East glad message brings. Night is a stealthy, evil Raven, Wrapped to the eyes in his black wings.
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Between the reputation of the author living and the reputation of the same author dead there is ever a wide discrepancy.
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O Liberty, white Goddess! is it well to leave the gates unguarded? On thy breast fold Sorrow's children, soothe the hurts of Fate, lift the down-trodden, but with hand of steel stay those who to thy sacred portals come to waste the gifts of Freedom.
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So I sit there kicked my heels, thinking about New Orleans, and watching a morbid blue-bottle fly attempt to commit suicide by butting his head against the windowpane.
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The fanatic has the courage of his conviction and the intolerance of his courage. He is opposed to the death penalty for murder, but he would willingly have anyone electrocuted who disagreed with him on the subject.
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This one sits shivering in Fortune's smile, taking his joy with bated, doubtful breath. This other, gnawed by hunger, all the while laughs in the teeth of Death.
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It is the Lord's Day, and I do believe that cheerful hearts and faces are not unpleasant in His sight.
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Imagine all human beings swept off the face of the earth, excepting one man. Imagine this man in some vast city, New York or London. Imagine him on the third or fourth day of his solitude sitting in a house and hearing a ring at the door-bell!
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Shakespeare is forever coming into our affairs -- putting in his oar, so to speak -- with some pat word or sentence.
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I like to have a thing suggested rather than told in full. When every detail is given, the mind rests satisfied, and the imagination loses the desire to use its own wings.
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A man is known by the company his mind keeps.
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So precious life is! Even to the old, the hours are as a miser's coins!
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What probing deep Has ever solved the mystery of sleep?
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Civilization is the lamb's skin in which barbarism masquerades.
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What is slang in one age sometimes goes into the vocabulary of the purist in the next.
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That was indeed to live -- at one bold swoop to wrest from darkling death the best that death to life can give.
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