Top 74 Quotes & Sayings by Louis MacNeice - Page 2

In my own prejudice.. I would have of a poet...whose worlds would not be too esoteric..fond of talking....capable of pity and laughter..appreciative of womem..involved in personal relationships...susceptible to physical impressions

I am not yet born; Forgive me For the sins that in me the world shall commit, my words When they speak me, my thoughts when they think me, My treason engendered by traitors beyound me, My life when they murder by means of my hands, my death when they live me.

And I envy the intransigence of my own Countrymen who shoot to kill and never See the victim's face become their own Or find his motive sabotage their motives.

I am not yet born; O hear me. Let not the bloodsucking bat or the rat or the stoat or the club-footed ghoul come near me.

There seeps from heavily jowled or hawk-like foreign faces The guttural sorrow of the refugees.

September has come, it is hers Whose vitality leaps in the autumn, Whose nature prefers Trees without leaves and a fire in the fireplace. So I give her this month and the next Though the whole of my year should be hers who has rendered already So many of its days intolerable or perplexed But so many more so happy. Who has left a scent on my life, and left my walls Dancing over and over with her shadow Whose hair is twined in all my waterfalls And all of London littered with remembered kisses.

Why do we like being Irish? Partly because It gives us a hold on the sentimental English As members of a world that never was, Baptized with fairy water

It's no go the picture palace, it's no go the stadium, It's no go the country cot with a pot of pink geraniums. It's no go the Government grants, it's no go the elections, Sit on your arse for fifty years and hang your hat on a pension.

You know the worst: your wills are fickle, Your values blurred, your hearts impure And your past life a ruined church-- But let your poison be your cure.

Up the Rebels, To Hell with the Pope, And God Save--as you prefer--the King or Ireland. The land of scholars and saints: Scholars and saints my eye, the land of ambush, Purblind manifestoes, never-ending complaints

I was the rector's son, born to the anglican order, Banned for ever from the candles of the Irish poor; The Chichesters knelt in marble at the end of a transept With ruffs about their necks, their portion sure.

All that I would like to be is human, having a share in a civilized, articulate and well-adjusted community where the mind is given its due but the body is not distrusted

I am not yet born; O fill me With strength against those who would freeze my humanity, would dragoon me into a lethal automaton would make me a cog in a machine, a thing with one face, a thing

a fortress against ideas and against the Shuddering insidious shock of the theory-vendors The little sardine men crammed in a monster toy Who tilt their aggregate beast against our crumbling Troy.