A Quote by Hilaire Belloc

For no one, in our long decline,So dusty, spiteful and divided,Had quite such pleasant friends as mine,Or loved them half as much as I did. [stanza 3]The library was most inviting:The books upon the crowded shelvesWere mainly of our private writing:We kept a school and taught ourselves. [stanza 15]From quiet homes and first beginning,Out to the undiscovered ends,Theres nothing worth the wear of winning,But laughter and the love of friends. [stanza 22]You do retain the song we set,And how it rises, trips and scans?You keep the sacred memory yet,Republicans? Republicans?[stanza 36]

Hilaire Belloc

Quote Topics

Beginning Books Crowded Decline Did Divided Dusty Ends First Friends Had Half Homes How Inviting Keep Kept Laughter Library Long Love Loved Mainly Memory Mine Most Much Nothing Our Ourselves Out Pleasant Private Quiet Quite Republicans Retain Rises Sacred School Set Song Spiteful Taught Them Trips Undiscovered Wear Winning Worth Writing

Quote Author

Hilaire Belloc
English - Poet
July 27, 1870 - July 16, 1953

For no one, in our long decline, So dusty, spiteful and divided, Had quite such pleasant friends as mine, Or loved them half as much as I did.

Hilaire Belloc

From quiet homes and first beginning, out to the undiscovered ends, there's nothing worth the wear of winning, but laughter and the love of friends.

Hilaire Belloc

The Italian word 'stanza' means 'a room', and a room is a good way to conceive of a stanza. A room, generally speaking, is sufficient for its own purposes, but it does not constitute a house. A stanza has the same sense of containment, without being complete or independent.

James Fenton

At four lines, with the quatrain, we reach the basic stanza form familiar from a whole range of English poetic practice. This is the length of the ballad stanza, the verse of a hymn, and innumerable other kinds of verse.

James Fenton

Very soon he will vanish completely in the wings of his own wordless stanza. [ ] but his stanza is not completely empty [ * ]

Mark Z. Danielewski

Poetry isn't written from the idea down. It's written from the phrase, line and stanza up, which is different from what your teacher taught you to do in school.

Margaret Atwood

I think of my peace paintings as one long poem, with each painting being a single stanza.

Robert Indiana

So much of our lives depends on accidents of birth, time, and geography. This haunts me. In some lives, few "or"s are possible. The pain of that is behind the second stanza of this poem.

Jane Hirshfield

I never indulge in rhyme or stanza Unless I'm in bed with the influenza.

Quintus Ennius

Reviewers have called my books 'novels in verse.' I think of them as written in prose, but I do use stanzas. Stanza means 'room' in Latin, and I wanted there to be 'room' - breathing opportunities to receive thoughts and have time to come out of them before starting again at the left margin.

Virginia Euwer Wolff

Until then I had lived as I had painted and versified - that is, I never got far beyond priming canvas, beyond penning an outline, a first act, a first stanza. There are simply people who start all sorts of things and yet never finish any of them. And that was the kind of person I was.

Leopold von Sacher-Masoch

Poetry makes its own pertinence, and a single stanza outweighs a book of prose.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

I never 'plan' a stanza. Words cluster like chromosomes, determining the procedure.

Marianne Moore

It has as much to do with the energy released by linguistic fission and fusion, with the buoyancy generated by cadence and tone and rhyme and stanza, as it has to do with the poem's concerns or the poet's truthfulness.

Seamus Heaney

Do not confuse understanding with a larger vocabulary, sacred writings are beneficial in stimulating desire for inward realization, if one stanza at a time is slowly assimilated. Continual intellectual study results in vanity and the false satisfaction of an undigested knowledge.