Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809–1892) British poet laureate
Part I, section xxii, stanza 10
Maud; A Monodrama (1855)
You Would Have Understood Me
Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809–1892) British poet laureate
Part I, section xxii, stanza 10
Maud; A Monodrama (1855)
Van Morrison (1945) Northern Irish singer-songwriter and musician
Have I Told You Lately
Song lyrics, Avalon Sunset (1989)
Leonid Brezhnev (1906–1982) General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union
Statement made in World War II, as a commissar on the southern front, as quoted in Leonid I. Brezhnev : Pages from his Life (1978) by Academy of Sciences of the USSR, p. 49; also in For the Soul of Mankind : The United States, the Soviet Union, and the Cold War (2007) by Melvyn P. Leffler, p. 237
“Like the measles, love is most dangerous when it comes late in life.”
George Gordon Byron (1788–1824) English poet and a leading figure in the Romantic movement
Debbie Reynolds (1932–2016) American actress, singer, and dancer
Source: Unsinkable : A Memoir (2013), Chapter 16. Bottoming Out in Beverley Hills
Gene Wolfe (1931–2019) American science fiction and fantasy writer
"Bed and Breakfast", Dante's Disciples (1995), ed. Edward E. Kramer, Reprinted in Gene Wolfe, Strange Travelers (2000), Reprinted in Gene Wolfe, The Best of Gene Wolfe (2009)
Fiction
“Late have I loved you, O Beauty ever ancient and ever new! Late have I loved you! And, behold, you were within me, and I out of myself, and there I searched for you.”
Sero te amavi, pulchritudo tam antiqua et tam nova, sero te amavi! et ecce intus eras et ego foris, et ibi te quaerebam.
Aurelius Augustinus book Confessions
X, 27, as translated in Theology and Discovery: Essays in honor of Karl Rahner, S.J. (1980) edited by William J. Kelly
Variant translations:
So late I loved you, O Beauty ever ancient and ever new! So late I loved you!
The Ethics of Modernism: Moral Ideas in Yeats, Eliot, Joyce, Woolf, and Beckett (2007), by Lee Oser, p. 29
Too late I loved you, O Beauty ever ancient and ever new! Too late I loved you! And, behold, you were within me, and I out of myself, and there I searched for you.
Introduction to a Philosophy of Religion (1970) by Alice Von Hildebrand
Confessions (c. 397)
“It is too late to start
For destinations not of the heart.
I must stay here with my hurt.”
R.S. Thomas (1913–2000) Welsh poet
"Here"
Tares (1961)
Benedict Cumberbatch (1976) English actor and film producer
"The 5-minute Interview: Benedict Cumberbatch, Actor" in The Independent https://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/profiles/the-5minute-interview-benedict-cumberbatch-actor-779150.html (7 February 2008)
“Even this late it happens:
the coming of love, the coming of light.”
Mark Strand (1934–2014) Canadian-American poet, essayist, translator
Source: Selected Poems