ENGL 292 QUOTES

Margaret, are you grieving / Over Goldengrove unleaving? . . . / It is the blight man was born for, / It is Margaret you mourn for.

Gerard Manley Hopkins, “Spring and Fall”

The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est / Pro patria mori.

Wilfred Owen, “Dulce et Decorum Est”

All changed, changed utterly: / A terrible beauty is born.

W.B. Yeats, “Easter 1916”

The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.

W.B. Yeats, “The Second Coming”

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, / Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?

W.B. Yeats, “The Second Coming”

Do I dare / Disturb the universe? / In a minute there is time / For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

T.S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.

T.S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent”

But superstition, like belief, must die, / And what remains when disbelief has gone?

Philip Larkin, “Church Going”

Next year we are to bring the soldiers home / For lack of money, and it is all right.

Philip Larkin, “Homage to a Government”

I who have stood dumb / when your betraying sisters, / cauled in tar, / wept by the railing, / who would connive / in civilized outrage / yet understand the exact / and tribal, intimate revenge.

Seamus Heaney, “Punishment”

see my jaw dropping neat Anglo-Saxon, / I got ink in my veins more than Caxton

Patience Agbabi, “Prologue (Grime Mix)”

They sent out a dove: it wobbled home / wings slicked in a rainbow of oil, ... / a yard of fishing-line binding its feet

Simon Armitage, “Bring Back the Leaf”

The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing. . . . What redeems it is the idea only.

Joseph Conrad, “Heart of Darkness”

Ah, but it was something to have at least a choice of nightmares.

Joseph Conrad, “Heart of Darkness”

The horror! The horror!

Joseph Conrad, “Heart of Darkness”

One by one they were all becoming shades …. His own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world.

James Joyce, “The Dead”

Life is not a series of gig-lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.

Virginia Woolf, “Modern Fiction”

in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment of June

Virginia Woolf, “Mrs. Dalloway”

All Animals are Equal. But Some Animals are More Equal Than Others.

George Orwell, “Animal Farm”

You see the folly of trying to contain writers inside passports

Salman Rushdie, “Imaginary Homelands”

But somewhere your scissors remember. Wherever they are. / Here somewhere, blades wide open, / April by April / Sinking deeper / Through the sod – an anchor, a cross of rust.

Ted Hughes, “Daffodils”

We had to write an essay about our hero at school, Mr. Mason, and I wrote about you.

J.K. Rowling, The Chamber of Secrets