William Wordsworth Quotes

“She fed him scraps from her ragbag because words were all that were left now. Perhaps he could use them to pay the ferryman. Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold. The world is charged with the grandeur of God. Full fathom five thy father lies. Little lamb, who made thee? Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie. On that best portion of a good man's life, his little nameless unremembered acts of kindness and of love. Farther and farther, all the birds of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.

The air rippled and shimmered. Time narrowed to a pinpoint. It was about to happen. Because the Holy Ghost over the bent world broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.”
― Kate Atkinson, A God in Ruins

“Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way.”
― William Wordsworth, I Wander'd Lonely as a Cloud

“In all ages woman has been the source of all that is pure, unselfish, and heroic in the spirit and life of man.....poetry and fiction are based upon woman's love, and the movements of history are mainly due to the sentiments or ambitions she has inspired......there is no aspiration which any man here to-night entertains, no achievement he seeks to accomplish, no great and honorable ambition he desires to gratify, which is not directly related to either or both a mother or a wife. From the hearth-stone around which linger the recollections of our mother, from the fireside where our wife awaits us, come all the purity, all the hope, and all the courage with which we fight the battle of life. The man who is not thus inspired, who labors not so much to secure the applause of the world as the solid and more precious approval of his home, accomplishes little of good for others or of honor for himself. I close with the hope that each of us may always have near us:

'A perfect woman, nobly planned,
To warn, to comfort, and command,
And yet a spirit still, and bright
With something of an angel light.”
― Chauncey M. Depew

“No other than the very heart of man,

As found among the best of those who live--

Not unexalted by religious faith, Nor uninformed by books, good books, though few-- In Nature's presence: thence may I select

Sorrow, that is not sorrow, but delight; And miserable love, that is not pain To hear of, for the glory that redounds Therefrom to human kind, and what we are.”
― William Wordsworth, 100 Selected Poems, William Wordsworth

“Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!

William Wordsworth - Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood”
― Richard Eyre, Life Before Life: Origins of the Soul

“She passed under the ivy-grown lych-gate and walked between the yew trees. The graves were clustered together in groups, as if they had secrets to share and were turning over-the-shoulder eyes on incomers. The newly mown grass was cadmium green oil paint squeezed straight from the tube.
Stella leaned on the railings as she read the inscriptions on William and Dorothy's graves. The light made the lettering crisp and brought out the purples and golds of the lichens. Shadows bowed the head of the lamb on Dora Quillinan's gravestone; the trees beyond were full of the trilling of blackbirds, and lines of Wordsworth's "Lucy" poem came into Stella's mind.
"No motion has she now, no force, she neither hears nor sees," she whispered. "Rolled round in earth's diurnal course, with rocks, and stones, and trees."”
― Caroline Scott, Good Taste