Stephen Spender: Trending quotes

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Stephen Spender: 152 quotes1 like

“What I had not foreseen
Was the gradual day
Weakening the will
Leaking the brightness away”

"What I Expected Was" (l. 9–12)

“Far far from gusty waves these children's faces.
Like rootless weeds the torn hair round their paleness.”

"An Elementary School Classroom In A Slum" in Modern British Poetry (1962) edited by Louis Untermeyer (1962) variant : Like rootless weeds, the hair torn around their pallor.
Ruins and Visions (1942)

“For I had expected always
Some brightness to hold in trust,
Some final innocence
To save from dust”

Stephen Spender

"What I Expected Was" (l. 25–28). . .

“In the last sweep of love, they pass over fields
Behind the aerodrome, where boys play all day
Hacking dead grass: whose cries, like wild birds
Settle upon the nearest roofs
But soon are hid under the loud city.”

Stephen Spender

"The Landscape near an Aerodrome"
Poems (1933)

“There is a certain justice in criticism. The critic is like a midwife — a tyrannical midwife.”

Stephen Spender

Lecture at Brooklyn College, as quoted in The New York Times (20 November 1984)

“They think how one life hums, revolves and toils,
One cog in a golden singing hive…”

Stephen Spender

"The Funeral" (l. 13–14)

“Paint here no draped despairs, no saddening clouds
Where the soul rests, proclaims eternity.
But let the wrong cry out as raw as wounds
This Time forgets and never heals, far less transcends.”

Stephen Spender

"In Railway Halls, on Pavements Near the Traffic"

“Your heart was loaded with its fate like lead
Pressing against the net of flesh: and those
Countries that crept back across the boundaries
Where you had forced open the arena
Of limelit France with your star at the centre,
Closed in on you, terrified no longer
At the diamond in your head
Which cut their lands and killed their men.”

Stephen Spender

"Napoleon In 1814"
The Still Centre (1939)

“History is the ship carrying living memories to the future.”

Stephen Spender

As quoted in Peter's Quotations : Ideas for Our Times (1993) by Laurence J. Peter, p. 247

“The iron arc of the avoiding journey
Curves back upon my weakness at the end;
Whether the faint light spark against my face
Or in the dark my sight hide from my sight,
Centre and circumference are both my weakness.”

Stephen Spender

"Darkness And Light"
The Still Centre (1939)

“When you smiled,
Everything in the room was shattered;
Only you remained whole
In frozen wonder, as though you stared
At your image in the broken mirror
Where it had always been silverly carried.”

Stephen Spender

"To A Spanish Poet"
The Still Centre (1939)

“I simply had to get there.”

Stephen Spender

Remark in 1980, after riding in a taxi for 287 miles, after his plane was grounded because of bad weather, to attend a dinner date with Jacqueline Onassis; as quoted in "Stephen Spender, Toady: Was there any substance to his politics and art?" by Stephen Metcalf at Slate.com (7 February 2005) http://www.slate.com/id/2113164/

“My single pair of eyes
Contain the universe they see;
Their mirrored multiplicity
Is packed into a hollow body
Where I reflect the many, in my one.”

Stephen Spender

"The Human Situation"
The Still Centre (1939)

“No one
Shall hunger: Man shall spend equally.
Our goal which we compel: Man shall be man.”

Stephen Spender

"Not Palaces" (l. 23–25)

“My words like eyes that flinch from light, refuse
And shut upon obscurity; my acts
Cast to their opposites by impatient violence
Break up the sequent path; they fly
On a circumference to avoid the centre.”

Stephen Spender

"Darkness And Light"
The Still Centre (1939)

“After the first powerful plain manifesto
The black statement of pistons, without more fuss
But gliding like a queen, she leaves the station.”

Stephen Spender

"The Express" (l. 1–3) in Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry (1988) edited by Richard Ellmann and Robert O’Clair