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"The moon has a face like the clock in the hall;She shines on thieves on the garden wall,On streets and fields and harbour quays,And birdies asleep in the forks of the trees."
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"I suppose that's how it looks in prose. But it's very different if you look at it through poetry and I think it's nicer' Anne recovered herself and her eyes shone and her cheeks flushed 'to look at it through poetry."

"There are many unspeakable words, forgotten, or forbidden.Great thanks to the poets who make them all become reachable."

"I thought all the trees were whispering to each other, passing news and plots along in an unintelligible language; and the branches swayed and groped without any wind. They do say the trees do actually move, and can surround strangers and hem them."

"Poetry involves the mysteries of the irrational perceived through rational words."

"For awhile after you quit Keats all other poetry seems to be only whistling or humming."

"Here the frailest leaves of me and yet my strongest lasting, Here I shade and hide my thoughts, I myself do not expose them, And yet they expose me more than all my other poems."

"Each day before the end of eveshe sought her lover, nor would him leave,until the stars were dimmed, and daycame glimmering eastward silver-grey.Then trembling-veiled she would appear,and dance before him, half in fear;there flitting just before his feetshe gently chid with laughter sweet:'Come! dance now, Beren, dance with me!For fain thy dancing I would see!"

"It is not metres, but a metre-making argument that makes a poem,-a thought so passionate and alive that like the spirit of a plant or an animal it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing. The thought and the form are equal in the order of time, but in the order of genesis the thought is prior to the form."

"Will the veiled sister pray for Those who walk in darkness, who chose thee and oppose thee, Those who are torn on the horn between season and season, time and time, between Hour and hour, word and word, power and power, those who wait In darkness? Will the veiled sister pray For children at the gate Who will not go away and cannot pray: Pray for those who chose and oppose."
Explore more quotes by Robert Louis Stevenson


"The habit of being happy enables one to be freed, or largely freed, from the domination of outward conditions."


"Keep your eyes open to your mercies. The man who forgets to be thankful has fallen asleep in life."


"When a torrent sweeps a man against a boulder, you must expect him to scream, and you need not be surprised if the scream is sometimes a theory."


"Happiness and goodness, according to canting moralists, stand in the relation of effect and cause. There was never anything less proved or less probable: our happiness is never in our own hands; we inherit our constitution; we stand buffet among friends and enemies; we may be so built as to feel a sneer or an aspersion with unusual keenness and so circumstanced as to be unusually exposed to them; we may have nerves very sensitive to pain, and be afflicted with a disease very painful. Virtue will not help us, and it is not meant to help us."


"To avoid an occasion for our virtues is a worse degree of failure than to push forward pluckily and fall."
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