Top 160 Edna St. Vincent Millay Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “To what purpose, April, do you return again? Beauty is not enough.”

— Edna St. Vincent Millay

52. “Please give me some good advice in your next letter. I promise not to follow it.”

— Edna St. Vincent Millay

53. “Without music I should wish to die.”

— Edna St. Vincent Millay

54. “I know what my heart is like Since your love died: It is like a hollow ledge Holding a little pool Left there by the tide, A little tepid pool, Drying inward from the edge.”

— Edna St. Vincent Millay

55. “I am waylaid by beauty.”

— Edna St. Vincent Millay

56. “I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.”

— Edna St. Vincent Millay

57. “If I love you Wednesday, What is that to you? I do not love you Thursday – so much is true.”

— Edna St. Vincent Millay

58. “Life isn’t all beer and skittles; few of us have touched a skittle in years.”

— Edna St. Vincent Millay

59. “Life has no friend...”

— Edna St. Vincent Millay

60. “Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain; Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink.”

— Edna St. Vincent Millay

61. “Euclid alone Has looked on Beauty bare. Fortunate they Who, though once only and then but far away, Have heard her massive sandal set on stone.”

— Edna St. Vincent Millay

62. “April comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.”

— Edna St. Vincent Millay

63. “The soul can split the sky in two, And let the face of God shine through. But East and West will pinch the heart That can not keep them pushed apart; And he whose soul is flat – the sky Will cave in on him by and by.”

— Edna St. Vincent Millay

64. “Not for the flag Of any land because myself was born there Will I give up my life. But I will love that land where man is free, And that will I defend.”

— Edna St. Vincent Millay

65. “Euclid alone has looked on Beauty bare. Let all who prate of Beauty hold their peace, And lay them prone upon the earth and cease To ponder on themselves, the while they stare At nothing, intricately drawn nowhere.”

— Edna St. Vincent Millay

66. “And he whose soul is flat – the sky Will cave in on him by and by.”

— Edna St. Vincent Millay

67. “I drank at every vine, the last was like the first. I came upon no wine so wonderful as thirst.”

— Edna St. Vincent Millay

68. “But if I can’t be sorry, why, I might as well be glad!”

— Edna St. Vincent Millay

69. “Father, I beg of Thee a little task To dignify my days, ’tis all I ask.”

— Edna St. Vincent Millay

70. “A person who publishes a book willfully appears before the populace with his pants down. If it is a good book nothing can hurt him. If it is a bad book nothing can help him.”

— Edna St. Vincent Millay

71. “Need we say it was not love, Now that love is perished?”

— Edna St. Vincent Millay

72. “Night falls fast. Today is in the past. Blown from the dark hill hither to my door Three flakes, then four Arrive, then many more.”

— Edna St. Vincent Millay

73. “Beauty never slumbers; All is in her name; But the rose remembers The dust from which it came.”

— Edna St. Vincent Millay

74. “Beautiful as a dandelion-blossom golden in the green grass, this life can be.”

— Edna St. Vincent Millay

75. “No one but Night, with tears on her dark face, watches beside me in this windy place.”

— Edna St. Vincent Millay

76. “Cruel of heart, lay down my song. Your reading eyes have done me wrong. Not for you was the pen bitten, And the mind wrung, and the song written.”

— Edna St. Vincent Millay

77. “Cut if you will with sleep’s dull knife, the years from off your life, my friend! the years that death takes off my life, he’ll take from off the other end!”

— Edna St. Vincent Millay

78. “The longest absence is less perilous to love than the terrible trials of incessant proximity.”

— Edna St. Vincent Millay

79. “After the feet of beauty fly my own.”

— Edna St. Vincent Millay

80. “Heap not on this mound roses that she loved so well; why bewilder her with roses that she cannot see or smell.”

— Edna St. Vincent Millay

81. “My heart is warm with the friends I make, And better friends I’ll not be knowing, Yet there isn’t a train I wouldn’t take, No matter where it’s going.”

— Edna St. Vincent Millay

82. “I know I am but summer to your heart, and not the full four seasons of the year.”

— Edna St. Vincent Millay

83. “Oh, children, growing up to be Adventurers into sophistry, Forbear, forbear to be of those That read the rood to learn the rose.”

— Edna St. Vincent Millay

84. “But you, you foolish girl, you have gone home to a leaky castle across the sea to lie awake in linen smelling of lavender, and hear the nightingale, and long for me.”

— Edna St. Vincent Millay

85. “Stranger, pause and look; From the dust of ages Lift this little book, Turn the tattered pages, Read me, do not let me die! Search the fading letters finding Steadfast in the broken binding All that once was I!”

— Edna St. Vincent Millay

86. “Progress-progress is the dirtiest word in the language-who ever told us- And made us believe it-that to take a step forward was necessarily, was always A good idea?”

— Edna St. Vincent Millay

87. “This book, when I am dead, will be A little faint perfume of me. People who knew me well will say, She really used to think that way.”

— Edna St. Vincent Millay

88. “After all my erstwhile dear, my no longer cherished; Need we say it was not love, just because it perished?”

— Edna St. Vincent Millay

89. “The only people I really hate are servants. They’re not really human beings at all.”

— Edna St. Vincent Millay

90. “Ah, I could lay me down in this long grass And close my eyes, and let the quiet wind Blow over me.”

— Edna St. Vincent Millay

91. “Not poppy, nor mandrake, Nor all the drowsy syrups of the world, Shall ever medicine thee to that sweet sleep, Which thou owest yesterday.”

— Edna St. Vincent Millay

92. “Sweet love, sweet thorn, when lightly to my heart. I took your thrust, whereby I since am slain, And I lie disheveled in the grass apart, A sodden thing bedrenched by tears and rain.”

— Edna St. Vincent Millay

93. “Sorrow like a ceaseless rain Beats upon my heart. People twist and scream in pain – Dawn will find them still again; This has neither wax nor wane, Neither stop nor start.”

— Edna St. Vincent Millay

94. “But she was not made for any man, and she will never be all mine.”

— Edna St. Vincent Millay

95. “Death devours all lovely things; Lesbia with her sparrow Shares the darkness – presently Every bed is narrow.”

— Edna St. Vincent Millay

96. “Earth does not understand her child, Who from the loud gregarious town Returns, depleted and defiled, To the still woods, to fling him down.”

— Edna St. Vincent Millay

97. “A Poem from Edna St. Vincent Millay: Grown-up Was it for this I uttered prayers, And sobbed and cursed and kicked the stairs, That now, domestic as a plate, I should retire at half-past eight?”

— Edna St. Vincent Millay

98. “There isn’t a train I wouldn’t take, no matter where it’s going.”

— Edna St. Vincent Millay

99. “Beautiful as a dandelion-blossom, golden in the green grass, This life can be. Common as a dandelion-blossom, beautiful in the clean grass, not beautiful Because common, beautiful because beautiful, Noble because common, because free.”

— Edna St. Vincent Millay

100. “I have loved badly, loved the great Too soon, withdrawn my words too late; And eaten in an echoing hall Alone and from a chipped plate The words that I withdrew too late.”

— Edna St. Vincent Millay