Walter De La Mare Quotes

After all, what is every man? A horde of ghosts – like a Chinese nest of boxes – oaks that were acorns that were oaks. Death lies behind us, not in front – in our ancestors, back and back until...

~ Walter De La Mare

It was this mystery, bereft now of all fear, and this beauty together that made life the endless, changing and yet changeless, thing it was. And yet mystery and loveliness alike were really only appreciable with one's legs, as it were, dangling down over into the grave.

~ Walter De La Mare

Who said, 'All Time's delightHath she for narrow bed;Life's troubled bubble broken'? ---That's what I said.

~ Walter De La Mare

Lear, Macbeth. Mercutio – they live on their own as it were. The newspapers are full of them, if we were only the Shakespeares to see it. Have you ever been in a Police Court? Have you ever watched tradesmen behind their counters? My soul, the secrets walking in the streets! You jostle them at every corner. There's a Polonius in every first-class railway carriage, and as many Juliets as there are boarding-schools. ... How inexhaustibly rich everything is, if you only stick to life.

~ Walter De La Mare

That's why I've just gone on … collecting this particular kind of stuff – what you might call riff-raff. There's not a book here, Lawford, that hasn't at least a glimmer of the real thing in it – just Life, seen through a living eye, and felt. As for literature, and style, and all that gallimaufry, don't fear for them if your author has the ghost of a hint of genius in his making.

~ Walter De La Mare

Science, I am told, is making great strides, experimenting, groping after things which no sane man has ever dreamed of before – without being burned alive for it.

~ Walter De La Mare

Pausing on the threshold, he looked in, conscious not so much of the few familiar sticks of furniture - the trucklebed, the worn strip of Brussels carpet, the chipped blue-banded ewer and basin, the framed illuminated texts on the walls - as of a perfect hive of abhorrent memories.That high cupboard in the corner, from which certain bodiless shapes had been wont to issue and stoop at him cowering out of his dreams; the crab-patterned paper that came alive as you stared; the window cold with menacing stars; the mouseholes, the rusty grate - trumpet of every wind that blows - these objects at once lustily shouted at him in their own original tongues.(Out Of The Deep)

~ Walter De La Mare

We are *all* we are, and all in a sense we care to dream we are. And for that matter, anything outlandish, bizarre, is a godsend in this rather stodgy life. It is after all just what the old boy said – it's only the impossible that's credible; whatever credible may mean...

~ Walter De La Mare

Fancies were all very well for a change, but must be only occasional guests in a world devoted to reality.

~ Walter De La Mare

God has mercifully ordered that the human brain works slowly; first the blow, hours afterwards the bruise.

~ Walter De La Mare

When indeed you positively press your face, so to speak, against the crystalline window of your eyes, your mind is apt to become a perfect vacuum.(Out Of The Deep)

~ Walter De La Mare

A poor old Widow in her weedsSowed her garden with wild-flower seeds;Not too shallow, and not too deep,And down came April -- drip -- drip -- drip.Up shone May, like gold, and soonGreen as an arbour grew leafy June.And now all summer she sits and sewsWhere willow herb, comfrey, bugloss blows,Teasle and pansy, meadowsweet,Campion, toadflax, and rough hawksbit;Brown bee orchis, and Peals of Bells;Clover, burnet, and thyme she smells;Like Oberon's meadows her garden isDrowsy from dawn to dusk with bees.Weeps she never, but sometimes sighs,And peeps at her garden with bright brown eyes;And all she has is all she needs --A poor Old Widow in her weeds.

~ Walter De La Mare

It was a pity thoughts always ran the easiest way, like water in old ditches.

~ Walter De La Mare

Yes, after all, this by now was his customary loneliness: there was little else he desired for the present than the hospitality of the dark.

~ Walter De La Mare

Poor sleepers should endeavor to compose themselves. Tampering with empty space, stirring up echoes in pitch-black pits of darkness is scarcely sedative.(Out Of The Deep)

~ Walter De La Mare

It is very seldom that one encounters what would appear to be sheer unadulterated evil in a human face; an evil, I mean, active, deliberate, deadly, dangerous. Folly, heedlessness, vanity, pride, craft, meanness, stupidity - yes. But even Iagos in this world are few, and devilry is as rare as witchcraft. (Bad Company)

~ Walter De La Mare

I believe in the devil, in the Powers of Darkness, Lawford, as firmly as I believe he and they are powerless – in the long run. They – what shall we say? - have surrendered their intrinsicality. You can just go through evil, as you can go through a sewer, and come out on the other side. A loathsome process too.

~ Walter De La Mare

His brow is seamed with line and scar;His cheek is red and dark as wine;The fires as of a Northern starBeneath his cap of sable shine.His right hand, bared of leathern glove,Hangs open like an iron gin,You stoop to see his pulses move,To hear the blood sweep out and in.He looks some king, so solitaryIn earnest thought he seems to stand,As if across a lonely seaHe gazed impatient of the land.Out of the noisy centuriesThe foolish and the fearful fade;Yet burn unquenched these warrior eyes,Time hath not dimmed, nor death dismayed.

~ Walter De La Mare

Thinking is like a fountain. Once it gets going at a certain pressure, well, it almost impossible to turn it off. And, my hat! what odd things come up with the water!(Out Of The Deep)

~ Walter De La Mare

Oh, pity the poor gluttonWhose troubles all beginIn struggling on and on to turnWhat's out into what's in.

~ Walter De La Mare

The time's gone by for sentiment and all that foolery. Mercy's all very well but after all it's justice that clinches the bargain.

~ Walter De La Mare

Let them enjoy their Eden while they can; though there's plenty of apples, I fear, on the tree yet, Mr Lawford.

~ Walter De La Mare

Hi! handsome hunting manFire your little gun.Bang! Now the animalis dead and dumb and done.Nevermore to peep again, creep again, leap again,Eat or sleep or drink again. Oh, what fun!

~ Walter De La Mare

In these days of faith-cures, and hypnotism, and telepathy, and subliminalities – why, the simple old world grows very confusing. But rarely, very rarely novel.

~ Walter De La Mare

Lawford had soundlessly stolen a pace or two nearer, and by stopping forward he could, each in turn, scrutinize the little intent company sitting over his story around the lamp at the further end of the table; squatting like little children with their twigs and pins, fishing for wonders on the brink of the unknown.

~ Walter De La Mare

Once a man strays out of the common herd, he's more likely to meet wolves in the thickets than angels.

~ Walter De La Mare

It was to be a day of queer experiences. He had never realized with how many miracles mere everyday life is besieged.

~ Walter De La Mare

When there hasn't been anything there, nothing can be said to have vanished from the place where it has not been.(Out Of The Deep)

~ Walter De La Mare