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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
Attempt
Butting
Suicide
Windowpane
Commit
Morbid
Watching
Kicked
Blue
Orleans
Head
Bottle
Thinking
Bottles
Heels

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Decoration Day is the most beautiful of our national holidays.... The grim cannon have turned into palm branches, and the shell and shrapnel into peach blossoms.
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Between the reputation of the author living and the reputation of the same author dead there is ever a wide discrepancy.
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What is lovely never dies, but passes into other loveliness, Star-dust, or sea-foam, flower or winged air.
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O Liberty, white Goddess! is it well to leave the gates unguarded? On thy breast fold Sorrow's children, soothe the hurts of Fate, lift the down-trodden, but with hand of steel stay those who to thy sacred portals come to waste the gifts of Freedom.
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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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The ocean moans over dead men's bones.
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But I, in the chilling twilight stand and wait At the portcullis, at thy castle gate, Longing to see the charmed door of dreams Turn on its noiseless hinges, delicate sleep!
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Imagine all human beings swept off the face of the earth, excepting one man. Imagine this man in some vast city, New York or London. Imagine him on the third or fourth day of his solitude sitting in a house and hearing a ring at the door-bell!
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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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They fail, and they alone, who have not striven.
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O harp of life, so speedily unstrung!
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No bird has ever uttered note That was not in some first bird's throat Since Eden's freshness and man's fall No rose has been original.
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The fanatic has the courage of his conviction and the intolerance of his courage. He is opposed to the death penalty for murder, but he would willingly have anyone electrocuted who disagreed with him on the subject.
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Shakespeare is forever coming into our affairs -- putting in his oar, so to speak -- with some pat word or sentence.
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Day is a snow-white Dove of heaven That from the East glad message brings. Night is a stealthy, evil Raven, Wrapped to the eyes in his black wings.
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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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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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