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So I sit there kicked my heels, thinking about New Orleans, and watching a morbid blue-bottle fly attempt to commit suicide by butting his head against the windowpane.

Thomas Bailey Aldrich

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Thomas Bailey Aldrich
Age: 70 †
Born: 1836
Born: November 2
Died: 1907
Died: March 19
Editor
Journalist
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Portsmouth
New Hampshire
Suicide
Windowpane
Commit
Morbid
Watching
Kicked
Blue
Orleans
Head
Bottle
Thinking
Bottles
Heels
Attempt
Butting

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How fugitive and brief is mortal life between the budding and the falling leaf.
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To keep the heart unwrinkled, to be hopeful, kindly, cheerful, reverent that is to triumph over old age.
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Black Tragedy lets slip her grim disguise and shows you laughing lips and roguish eyes but when, unmasked, gay Comedy appears, how wan her cheeks are, and what heavy tears!
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The ocean moans over dead men's bones.
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Gracious to all, to none subservient, Without offense he spoke the word he meant
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What is a day to an immortal soul! A breath, no more.
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It is the Lord's Day, and I do believe that cheerful hearts and faces are not unpleasant in His sight.
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The ring of a false coin is not more recognizable than that of a rhyme setting forth a false sorrow.
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I like not lady-slippers, Nor yet the sweet-pea blossoms, Nor yet the flaky roses, Red or white as snow I like the chaliced lilies, The heavy Eastern lilies, The gorgeous tiger-lilies, That in our garden grow.
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Books that have become classics - books that have had their day and now get more praise than perusal - always remind me of retired colonels and majors and captains who, having reached the age limit, find themselves retired on half pay.
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When friends are at your hearthside met, Sweet courtesy has done its most If you have made each guest forget That he himself is not the host.
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The possession of unlimited power will make a despot of almost any man. There is a possible Nero in the gentlest human creature that walks.
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Up from the dark the moon begins to creep and now a pallid, haggard face lifts she above the water-line: thus from the deep a drowned body rises solemnly.
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All the best sands of my life are somehow getting into the wrong end of the hourglass. If I could only reverse it! Were it in my power to do sowould I?
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A glance, a word -- and joy or pain befalls.... How slight the links are in the chain that binds us to our destiny!
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The fate of the worm refutes the pretended ethical teaching of the proverb, which assumes to illustrate the advantage of early rising and does so by showing how extremely dangerous it is.
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We weep when we are born, Not when we die!
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That was indeed to live -- at one bold swoop to wrest from darkling death the best that death to life can give.
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