“Poetry is a sort of truancy, a dream within the dream of life, a wild flower planted among our wheat.”

San Manuel Bueno, Mártir (1933), Prologue

"The Expensive Moment"

"Island"
Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951)
Variant: What happens
to a dream deferred?
Daddy, ain’t you heard?

Source: The Dream of a Ridiculous Man (1877), V
Context: A dream! What is a dream? And is not our life a dream? I will say more. Suppose that this paradise will never come to pass (that I understand), yet I shall go on preaching it. And yet how simple it is: in one day, in one hour everything could be arranged at once! The chief thing is to love others like yourself, that's the chief thing, and that's everything; nothing else is wanted — you will find out at once how to arrange it all. And yet it's an old truth which has been told and retold a billion times — but it has not formed part of our lives! The consciousness of life is higher than life, the knowledge of the laws of happiness is higher than happiness — that is what one must contend against. And I shall. If only everyone wants it, it can be arranged at once.

Quoted in "Britons Beaten?" - Time Magazine - October 16, 1933

Gesta Regum Anglorum (1125), quoted in M. J. Cohen and John Major (eds.), History in Quotations (Cassell, 2004), p. 160

Quoted in page=30
Mukesh Dhirajlal Ambani, Anil Dhirajlal Ambani

Source: The Unbearable Lightness of Being

All from The Vow of the Peacock (Title Poem - Introduction)
The Vow of the Peacock (1835)