Louis MacNeice Quotes

Let them not make me a stone and let them not spill me, otherwise kill me.

Time was away and somewhere else, There were two glasses and two chairs And two people with one pulse.

A pharaoh's profile, a Krishna's grace, tail like a question mark.

It's no go the merry-go-round, it's no go the rickshaw All we want is a limousine and a ticket for the peepshow.

I am not yet born; O fill me with strength against those who would freeze my humanity.

The sunlight on the garden Hardens and grows cold, We cannot cage the minute Within its nets of gold

Better authentic mammon than a bogus god.

World is crazier and more of it than we think, Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion A tangerine and spit the pips and feel The drunkenness of things being various.

None of our hearts are pure, we always have mixed motives. Are self deceivers, but the worst of all Deceits is to murmur 'Lord, I am not worthy' And, lying easy, turn your face to the wall.

World is suddener than we fancy it.

Politics: distrust all parties but consider capitalism must go.

Down the road someone is practicing scales, The notes like little fishes vanish with a wink of tails

a fortress against ideas and against the Shuddering insidious shock of the theory-vendors The little sardine men crammed in a monster toy Who tilt their aggregate beast against our crumbling Troy.

blind wantons like the gulls who scream And rip the edge off any ideal or dream.

And I envy the intransigence of my own Countrymen who shoot to kill and never See the victim's face become their own Or find his motive sabotage their motives.

You know the worst: your wills are fickle, Your values blurred, your hearts impure And your past life a ruined church-- But let your poison be your cure.

I am not yet born; O hear me. Let not the bloodsucking bat or the rat or the stoat or the club-footed ghoul come near me.

There seeps from heavily jowled or hawk-like foreign faces The guttural sorrow of the refugees.

All that I would like to be is human, having a share in a civilized, articulate and well-adjusted community where the mind is given its due but the body is not distrusted

Why do we like being Irish? Partly because It gives us a hold on the sentimental English As members of a world that never was, Baptized with fairy water

I am not yet born; O fill me With strength against those who would freeze my humanity, would dragoon me into a lethal automaton would make me a cog in a machine, a thing with one face, a thing

A city built upon mud; A culture built upon profit; Free speech nipped in the bud, The minority always guilty. Why should I want to go back To you, Ireland, my Ireland?

World is crazier and more of it than we think, Incorrigibly plural.

The rules or 'laws' of poetry are only tentative devices, an approximate scheme. There is no Sinaitic recipe for poetry, for the individual poem is the norm.

I am not yet born O fill me with strength against those who would freeze my humanity.

I would admit that poetry is something more than mere communication and that if that 'something more' could be abstracted from the whole, it might well prove to be that which makes the whole a poem.

Or because they hope these walls of books will deaden the drumming of the demon in their ears

Let us thank God for valour in abstractionFor those who go their own way, will not kissThe arse of law and order nor compoundFor physical comfort at the price of pride

But glad to have sat underThunder and rain with you, And grateful tooFor sunlight on the garden.