Top 40 Walter de la Mare Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Look thy last on all things lovely, Every hour.”

— Walter de la Mare

2. “As long as I live I shall always be My Self – and no other, Just me.”

— Walter de la Mare

3. “It was a pity thoughts always ran the easiest way, like water in old ditches.”

— Walter de la Mare

4. “Poor tired Tim! It’s sad for him He lags the long bright morning through, Ever so tired of nothing to do.”

— Walter de la Mare

5. “Hi! handsome hunting man Fire your little gun. Bang! Now the animal is dead and dumb and done. Nevermore to peep again, creep again, leap again, Eat or sleep or drink again. Oh, what fun!”

— Walter de la Mare

6. “But beauty vanishes; beauty passes; However rare rare it be; And when I crumble, who will remember This lady of the West Country?”

— Walter de la Mare

7. “We wake and whisper awhile, But, the day gone by, Silence and sleep like fields Of amaranth lie.”

— Walter de la Mare

8. “After all, what is every man? A horde of ghosts – like a Chinese nest of boxes – oaks that were acorns that were oaks. Death lies behind us, not in front – in our ancestors, back and back until...”

— Walter de la Mare

9. “For beauty with sorrow Is a burden hard to be borne: The evening light on the foam, and the swans, there; That music, remote, forlorn.”

— Walter de la Mare

10. “Do diddle di do, Poor Jim Jay Got stuck fast In Yesterday.”

— Walter de la Mare

11. “Oh, pity the poor glutton Whose troubles all begin In struggling on and on to turn What’s out into what’s in.”

— Walter de la Mare

12. “What a haunting, inescapable riddle life was.”

— Walter de la Mare

13. “The only catalogue of this world’s goods that really counts is that which we keep in the silence of the mind.”

— Walter de la Mare

14. “Unless you were preternaturally busy and preoccupied, you simply couldn’t live on and on in a haunted house without being occasionally reminded of its ghosts.”

— Walter de la Mare

15. “A lost but happy dream may shed its light upon our waking hours, and the whole day may be infected with the gloom of a dreary or sorrowful one; yet of neither may we be able to recover a trace.”

— Walter de la Mare

16. “An hour’s terror is better than a lifetime of timidity.”

— Walter de la Mare

17. “Three jolly huntsmen, In coats of red, Rode their horses Up to bed.”

— Walter de la Mare

18. “Acquaintances, after all, are little else than a bad habit.”

— Walter de la Mare

19. “Science, I am told, is making great strides, experimenting, groping after things which no sane man has ever dreamed of before – without being burned alive for it.”

— Walter de la Mare

20. “A harvest mouse goes scampering by, With silver claws and silver eye; And moveless fish in the water gleam, By silver reeds in a silver stream.”

— Walter de la Mare

21. “Too late for fruit, too soon for flowers.”

— Walter de la Mare

22. “What is the world, O soldiers? It is I, I, this incessant snow, This northern sky.”

— Walter de la Mare

23. “A face peered. All the grey night In chaos of vacancy shone; Nought but vast Sorrow was there The sweet cheat gone.”

— Walter de la Mare

24. “So, blind to Someone I must be.”

— Walter de la Mare

25. “All but blind In his chambered hole Gropes for worms The four-clawed Mole.”

— Walter de la Mare

26. “When I lie where shades of darkness Shall no more assail mine eyes.”

— Walter de la Mare

27. “Very old are the woods; And the buds that break Out of the brier’s boughs, When March winds wake, So old with their beauty are – Oh, no man knows Through what wild centuries Roves back the rose.”

— Walter de la Mare

28. “They say death’s a going to bed; I doubt it; but anyhow life’s a long undressing. We came in puling and naked, and every stitch must come off before we get out again. We must stand on our feet in all our Rabelaisian nakedness, and watch the world fade.”

— Walter de la Mare

29. “All day long the door of the sub-conscious remains just ajar; we slip through to the other side, and return again, as easily and secretly as a cat.”

— Walter de la Mare

30. “I know well that only the rarest kind of best can be good enough for the young.”

— Walter de la Mare

31. “What lovely things Thy hand hath made.”

— Walter de la Mare

32. “Once a man strays out of the common herd, he’s more likely to meet wolves in the thickets than angels.”

— Walter de la Mare

33. “Dobbin at manger pulls his hay: Gone is another summer’s day.”

— Walter de la Mare

34. “God has mercifully ordered that the human brain works slowly; first the blow, hours afterwards the bruise.”

— Walter de la Mare

35. “As soon as they’re out of your sight, you are out of their mind.”

— Walter de la Mare

36. “The time’s gone by for sentiment and all that foolery. Mercy’s all very well but after all it’s justice that clinches the bargain.”

— Walter de la Mare

37. “Now that cleverness was the fashion most people were clever – even perfect fools; and cleverness after all was often only a bore: all head and no body.”

— Walter de la Mare

38. “Fancies were all very well for a change, but must be only occasional guests in a world devoted to reality.”

— Walter de la Mare

39. “I believe in the devil, in the Powers of Darkness, Lawford, as firmly as I believe he and they are powerless – in the long run. They – what shall we say? – have surrendered their intrinsicality. You can just go through evil, as you can go through a sewer, and come out on the other side. A loathsome process too.”

— Walter de la Mare

40. “In these days of faith-cures, and hypnotism, and telepathy, and subliminalities – why, the simple old world grows very confusing. But rarely, very rarely novel.”

— Walter de la Mare

41. “It was this mystery, bereft now of all fear, and this beauty together that made life the endless, changing and yet changeless, thing it was. And yet mystery and loveliness alike were really only appreciable with one’s legs, as it were, dangling down over into the grave.”

— Walter de la Mare

42. “And I suffered the streaming light to fall upon me, as I gazed into my joy and triumph with a kind of severe nonchalance. But though my face under my three-cornered hat can have expressed only calmness and resolution, I knew in my heart that my thoughts were merely a thin wisp of smoke above the crater of a suppressed volcano.”

— Walter de la Mare

43. “Lawford had soundlessly stolen a pace or two nearer, and by stopping forward he could, each in turn, scrutinize the little intent company sitting over his story around the lamp at the further end of the table; squatting like little children with their twigs and pins, fishing for wonders on the brink of the unknown.”

— Walter de la Mare

44. “Yes, after all, this by now was his customary loneliness: there was little else he desired for the present than the hospitality of the dark.”

— Walter de la Mare

45. “And it always seems to me,′ he went on ruminatingly, ’that, after all, we are nothing better than interlopers on the earth, disfiguring and staining wherever we go.”

— Walter de la Mare