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And lo, the Hospital, gray, quiet, old, Where life and death like friendly chafferers meet.

William Ernest Henley

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William Ernest Henley
Age: 53 †
Born: 1849
Born: August 23
Died: 1903
Died: July 11
Editor
Journalist
Literary Critic
Poet
Writer
W. E. Henley
Medical
Meet
Quiet
Death
Life
Hospital
Like
Hospitals
Gray
Friendly

More quotes by William Ernest Henley

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Life is worth Living Through every grain of it, From the foundations To the last edge Of the cornerstone, death.
William Ernest Henley
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The life of Dumas is not only a monument of endeavour and success, it is a sort of labyrinth as well. It abounds in pseudonyms and disguises, in sudden and unexpected appearances and retreats as unexpected and sudden, in scandals and in rumours, in mysteries and traps and ambuscades of every kind.
William Ernest Henley
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A late lark twitters from the quiet skies.
William Ernest Henley
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Pointed criticism, if accurate, often gives the artist an inner sense of relief. The criticism that damages is that which disparages, dismisses, ridicules, or condemns.
William Ernest Henley
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beyond this place of wrath and tears looms but the horror of the shade
William Ernest Henley
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In the fell clutch of circumstance, I have not winced nor cried aloud: Under the bludgeoning of chance my head is bloody, but unbowed.
William Ernest Henley
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Essayists, like poets, are born and not made, and for one worth remembering, the world is confronted with a hundred not worth reading. Your true essayist is, in a literary sense, the friend of everybody.
William Ernest Henley
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Shakespeare often writes so ill that you hesitate to believe he could ever write supremely well or, if this way of putting it seem indecorous and abominable, he very often writes so well that you are loth to believe he could ever have written thus extremely ill.
William Ernest Henley
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Men there have been who have done the essayist's part so well as to have earned an immortality in the doing but we have had not many of them, and they make but a poor figure on our shelves. It is a pity that things should be thus with us, for a good essayist is the pleasantest companion imaginable.
William Ernest Henley
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It is the artist's function not to copy but to synthesise: to eliminate from that gross confusion of actuality which is his raw material whatever is accidental, idle, irrelevant, and select for perpetuation that only which is appropriate and immortal.
William Ernest Henley
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Life - life - life! 'Tis the sole great thing This side of death, Heart on heart in the wonder of Spring!
William Ernest Henley
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Life - life - let there be life! Better a thousand times the roaring hours When wave and wind, Like the Arch-Murderer in flight From the Avenger at his heel, Storm through the desolate fastnesses And wild waste places of the world!
William Ernest Henley
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Who but knows How it goes! Life's a last year's Nightingale, Love's a last year's rose.
William Ernest Henley
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So be my passing! My task accomplished and the long day done, My wages taken, and in my heart Some late lark singing, Let me be gathered in the quiet west, The sundown splendid and serene, Death.
William Ernest Henley
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This is the merit and distinction of art: to be more real than reality, to be not nature but nature's essence.
William Ernest Henley
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O, it's die we must, but it's live we can, And the marvel of earth and sun Is all for the joy of woman and man And the longing that makes them one. (Between the Dusk of a Summer Night, 13-16)
William Ernest Henley
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Life - life - let there be life!
William Ernest Henley
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Life - give me life until the end, That at the very top of being, The battle-spirit shouting in my blood, Out of the reddest hell of the fight I may be snatched and flung Into the everlasting lull, The immortal, incommunicable dream.
William Ernest Henley
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Life is, I think, a blunder and a shame.
William Ernest Henley
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Behold me waiting—waiting for the knife.... The thick, sweet mystery of chloroform, The drunken dark, the little death-in-life.... [F]ace to face with chance, I shrink a little: My hopes are strong, my will is something weak. ...I am ready But, gentlemen my porters, life is brittle: You carry Cæsar and his fortunes—steady!
William Ernest Henley