Quotes by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
But the child's sob curses deeper in the silence than the strong man in his wrath!
First time he kissed me, he but only kissed The fingers of this hand wherewith I write; And, ever since, it grew more clean and white.
The beautiful seems right by force of beauty and the feeble wrong because of weakness.
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
Earth's crammed with heaven, And every common bush afire with God: But only he who sees takes off his shoes.
At painful times, when composition is impossible and reading is not enough, grammars and dictionaries are excellent for distraction.
Smiles, tears, of all my life! - and, if God choose, I shall but love thee better after death.
God answers sharp and sudden on some prayers, And thrusts the thing we have prayed for in our face, A gauntlet with a gift in it.
How many desolate creatures on the earth have learnt the simple dues of fellowship and social comfort, in a hospital.
What I do and what I dream include thee, as the wine must taste of its own grapes.
A woman is always younger than a man at equal years.
World's use is cold, world's love is vain, world's cruelty is bitter bane; but is not the fruit of pain.
What is genius but the power of expressing a new individuality?
He lives most life whoever breathes most air.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height my soul can reach.
The works of women are symbolical. We sew, sew, prick our fingers, dull our sight, Producing what? A pair of slippers, sir, To put on when you
The place is all awave with trees, Limes, myrtles, purple-beaded, Acacias having drunk the lees Of the night-dew, fain headed, And wan, grey olive-woods, which seem The fittest foliage for a dream.
To each mortal peradventure earth becomes a new machine.
Girls blush, sometimes, because they are alive, half wishing they were dead to save the shame. The sudden blush devours them, neck and brow; They have drawn too near the fire of life, like gnats, and flare up bodily, wings and all. What then? Who's sorry for a gnat or girl?
He, in his developed manhood, stood, a little sunburn by the glare of life.
A woman cannot do the thing she ought, which means whatever perfect thing she can, in life, in art, in science, but she fears to let the perfect action take her part and rest there: she must prove what she can do before she does it, -- prate of woman's rights, of woman's mission, woman's function, till the men (who are prating, too, on their side) cry, A woman's function plainly is... to talk. Poor souls, they are very reasonably vexed!
Books, books, books had found the secret of a garret-room piled high with cases in my father's name; Piled high, packed large, --where, creeping in and out among the giant fossils of my past, like some small nimble mouse between the ribs of a mastodon, I nibbled here and there at this or that box, pulling through the gap, in heats of terror, haste, victorious joy, the first book first. And how I felt it beat under my pillow, in the morning's dark. An hour before the sun would let me read! My books!
O rose, who dares to name thee? No longer roseate now, nor soft, nor sweet, But pale, and hard, and dry, as stubblewheat,-- Kept seven years in a drawer, thy titles shame thee.
For 'tis not in mere death that men die most.
'Guess now who holds thee?'—'Death,' I said. But, there, The silver answer rang, . . . 'Not Death, but Love.'
