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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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Thomas Bailey Aldrich
Age: 70 †
Born: 1836
Born: November 2
Died: 1907
Died: March 19
Editor
Journalist
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Portsmouth
New Hampshire
Brief
Mortal
Mortals
Falling
Fall
Budding
Life
Fugitive
Leafs
Leaf

More quotes by Thomas Bailey Aldrich

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Come watch with me the shaft of fire that glows in yonder West the fair, frail palaces, The fading Alps and archipelagoes and great cloud continents of sunset-seas.
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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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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 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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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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October turned my maple's leaves to gold The most are gone now here and there one lingers: Soon these will slip from the twigs' weak hold, Like coins between a dying miser's fingers.
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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To keep the heart unwrinkled, to be hopeful, kindly, cheerful, reverent that is to triumph over old age.
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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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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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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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What is slang in one age sometimes goes into the vocabulary of the purist in the next.
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
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O harp of life, so speedily unstrung!
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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It is only your habitual late riser who takes in the full flavor of Nature at those rare intervals when he gets up to go afishing. He brings virginal emotions and unsatiated eyes to the sparkling freshness of earth and stream and sky.
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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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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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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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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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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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