“Here one cries sudden on a sobbing breath,
Gripped in the clutch of some incarnate fear
What terror through the darkness draweth near?
What memory of carnage and ofdeath
What vanished scenes of dread to his closed eyes appear?”
Unsourced, Night Duty
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Eva Dobell15
British poet 1876–1963Related quotes
Eva Dobell (1876–1963) British poet
Unsourced, In A Soldiers' Hospital 1: Pluck
W. H. Auden book Forewords and Afterwords
"Un Homme d'Esprit", p. 361
Forewords and Afterwords (1973)
“For as children tremble and fear everything in the blind darkness, so we in the light sometimes fear what is no more to be feared than the things that children in the dark hold in terror and imagine will come true. This terror, therefore, and darkness of mind must be dispelled not by the rays of the sun and glittering shafts of daylight, but by the aspect and law of nature.”
Nam veluti pueri trepidant atque omnia caecis
in tenebris metuunt, sic nos in luce timemus
interdum, nilo quae sunt metuenda magis quam
quae pueri in tenebris pavitant finguntque futura.
hunc igitur terrorem animi tenebrasque necessest
non radii solis neque lucida tela diei
discutiant sed naturae species ratioque.
Lucretius (-94–-55 BC) Roman poet and philosopher
Book II, lines 55–61 (tr. Rouse)
De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things)
Chế Lan Viên (1920–1989) Vietnamese writer
"Creation", as quoted in "Shattered Identities and Contested Images: Reflections of Poetry and History in 20th-Century Vietnam" by Neil Jamieson, in Crossroads: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, Vol. 7, No. 2, 1992, p. 89, and in Understanding Vietnam by Neil Jamieson (University of California Press, 1995), ISBN 978-0520916586, p. 164
“One cannot reduce terror by holding over the world the threat of what it most fears.”
Wendell Berry (1934) author
Citizenship Papers (2003), A Citizen's Response
“Through life’s dark road his sordid way he wends,
An incarnation of fat dividends.”
Charles Sprague (1791–1875) Boston businessman and poet
Curiosity, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).
Richard Alleine (1611–1681) English clergyman
Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 277.