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Now, in our opinion no author should be blamed for obscurity, nor should any pains be grudged in the effort to understand him, provided that he has done his best to be intelligible. Difficult thoughts are quite distinct from difficult words. Difficulty of thought is the very heart of poetry.

Alice Meynell

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Alice Meynell
Age: 75 †
Born: 1847
Born: September 22
Died: 1922
Died: November 27
Essayist
Literary Critic
Poet
Writer
Barnes
England
Alice Christiana Gertrude Meynell
Alice Christiana Gertrude Thompson
Understand
Difficulty
Difficult
Poetry
Intelligible
Thought
Thoughts
Blamed
Best
Quite
Obscurity
Done
Opinion
Distinct
Heart
Effort
Pains
Words
Provided
Pain
Author

More quotes by Alice Meynell

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recurrence is sure. What the mind suffered last week, or last year, it does not suffer now but it will suffer again next week or next year. Happiness is not a matter of events it depends upon the tides of the mind.
Alice Meynell
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There is no innocent sleep so innocent as sleep shared between a woman and a child, the little breath hurrying beside the longer, as a child's foot runs.
Alice Meynell
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If there is a look of human eyes that tells of perpetual loneliness, so there is also the familiar look that is the sign of perpetual crowds.
Alice Meynell
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for man, woman, and child the tender, irregular, sensitive, living foot, which does not even stand with all its little surface on the ground, and which makes no base to satisfy an architectural eye, is, as it were, the unexpected thing. ... nothing makes a more helpless and unsymmetrical sign than does a naked foot.
Alice Meynell
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Let us turn to our own childhoods-no further-if we will renew our sense of remoteness, and of the mystery of change.
Alice Meynell
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Rich meanings of the prophet-Spring adorn, / Unseen, this colorless sky of folded showers, / And folded winds...
Alice Meynell
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Solitude is separate experience.
Alice Meynell
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Our fathers valued change for the sake of its results we value it in the act.
Alice Meynell
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My day-mind can endure / Upright, in hope, all it must undergo. / But O, afraid, unsure, / My night-mind waking lies too low, too low.
Alice Meynell
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There is nothing in the world more peaceful than apple - leaves with an early moon.
Alice Meynell
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A wall is the safeguard of simplicity.
Alice Meynell
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We talk of sunshine and moonshine, but not of cloud-shine, which is yet one of the illuminations of our skies. A shining cloud is one of the most majestic of all secondary lights.
Alice Meynell
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I have known some grim bells, with not a single joyous note in the whole peal, so forced to hurry for a human festival, with their harshness made light of, as though the Bishop of Hereford had again been forced to dance in his boots by a merry highwayman.
Alice Meynell
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Terrestrial scenery is much, but it is not all. Men go in search of it but the celestial scenery journeys to them it goes its way round the world. It has no nation, it costs no wearinesss, it knows no bonds.
Alice Meynell
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In childhood we all have ... a far higher sensibility for April and April evenings - a heartache for them, which in riper years is gradually and irretrievably consoled.
Alice Meynell
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Children have a fastidiousness that time is slow to cure. It is to be wondered, for example, whether if the elderly were half as hungry as children are they would yet find so many things at table to be detestable.
Alice Meynell
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She walks--the lady of my delight-- A sheperdess of sheep. Her flocks are thoughts. She keeps them white She guards them from the steep. She feeds them on the fragrant height, And folds them in for sleep.
Alice Meynell
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No mirror keeps its glances.
Alice Meynell
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The true colour of life is the colour of the body, the colour of the covered red, the implicit and not explicit red of the living heart and the pulses. It is the modest colour of the unpublished blood.
Alice Meynell
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The sense of humor has other things to do than to make itself conspicuous in the act of laughter.
Alice Meynell