Walter de La Mare Quotes

When summer opens, I see how fast it matures, and fear it will be short; but after the heats of July and August, I am reconciled, like one who has had his swing, to the cool of autumn.

The heroes of our youth grow old - 'the boys of summer in their ruin', in Dylan Thomas's verse - yet we seem the same.

Occasionally the very youngness of the young moved him to charity--they had no sense of the swiftness of life, nor of its limits. The years would pass like weeks, and loves would pass too, or else grow sour.

We aged a hundred years, and this happened in a single hour: the short summer had already died, the body of the ploughed plains smoked.

Through the dripping weeks that follow One another slow, and soak Summer's extinguished fire and autumn's drifting smoke.

The summer has ended. The garden withers. The mornings become chill. I am thirty, I am thirty-four -the years turn dry as leaves.

Perhaps the wind Wails so in winter for the summers dead, And all sad sounds are nature's funeral cries For what has been and is not.

What's that sound I hear? It's just my lifetime It's whistling past my ear

Time's horses gallop down the lessening hill.

[T]hat old September feeling, left over from school days, of summer passing, vacation nearly done, obligations gathering, books and football in the air ... Another fall, another turned page: there was something of jubilee in that annual autumnal beginning, as if last year's mistakes had been wiped clean by summer.

Fair summer droops, droop men and beasts therefore: So fair a summer look for never more. All good things vanish, less than in a day, Peace, plenty, pleasure, suddenly decay. Go not yet away, bright soul of the sad year; The earth is hell when thou leav'st to appear.

It's funny, don't you think, how time seems to do a lot of things? It flies, it tells, and worst of all, it runs out.

Where now are the horse and the rider? Where is the horn that was blowing? Where is the helm and the hauberk, and the bright hair flowing? Where is the harp on the harpstring, and the red fire glowing? Where is the spring and the harvest and the tall corn growing? They have passed like rain on the mountain, like a wind in the meadow; The days have gone down in the West behind the hills into shadow. Who shall gather the smoke of the deadwood burning, Or behold the flowing years from the Sea returning?

He hath shook hands with time.

How soon hath Time, the subtle thief of youth, stolen on his wing my three-and-twentieth year!

My life's long radiant Summer halts at last, And lo! beside my path way I behold Pursuing Autumn glide: nor frost nor cold Has heralded her presence; but a vast Sweet calm that comes not till the year has passed Its fevered solstice, and a tinge of gold Subdues the vivid colouring of bold And passion-hued emotions. I will cast My August days behind me with my May, Nor strive to drag them into Autumn's place, Nor swear I hope when I do but remember. Now violet and rose have had their day, I'll pluck the soberer asters with good grace And call September nothing but September.

No, Time, thou shalt not boast that I do change.

Some of the days in November carry the whole memory of summer as a fire opal carries the color of moonrise.

The most intractable of our experiences is the experience of Time-the intuition of duration, combined with the thought of perpetual perishing.

Time ... brings us everything we have and are, then comes with a back-loader and starts taking it all away.