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Great orators who are not also great writers become very indistinct shadows to the generations following them. The spell vanishes with the voice.

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
Generations
Orators
Voice
Spell
Become
Spells
Also
Shadows
Great
Following
Writers
Shadow
Indistinct
Speech
Vanishes

More quotes by Thomas Bailey Aldrich

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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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The ring of a false coin is not more recognizable than that of a rhyme setting forth a false sorrow.
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
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Dialect tempered with slang is an admirable medium of communication between persons who have nothing to say and persons who would not care for anything properly said.
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
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The thing one reads and likes, and then forgets, is of no account. The thing that stays, and haunts one, and refuses to be forgotten, that is the sincere thing.
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
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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!
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
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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.
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
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How fugitive and brief is mortal life between the budding and the falling leaf.
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
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What is lovely never dies, but passes into other loveliness, Star-dust, or sea-foam, flower or winged air.
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
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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.
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
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The young girl in my story is to be as sensitive to praise as a prism is to light. Whenever anybody praises her she breaks into colors.
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
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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.
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
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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!
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
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I beg you come tonight and dine A welcome waits you and sound wine The Roederer chilly to a charm As Juno's breasts the claret warm.
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
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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.
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
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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?
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
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They fail, and they alone, who have not striven.
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
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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.
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
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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.
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
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My mind lets go a thousand things, Like dates of wars and deaths of kings
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
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Shakespeare is forever coming into our affairs -- putting in his oar, so to speak -- with some pat word or sentence.
Thomas Bailey Aldrich