poems for friends

In the country the darkness of night is friendly and familiar, but in a city, with its blaze of lights, it is unnatural, hostile and menacing. It is like a monstrous vulture that hovers, biding its time. ~Somerset Maugham



If you shut your door to all errors truth will be shut out. ~Rabindranath Tagore, Stray Birds, 1916



Some defeats are more triumphant than victories. ~Montaigne, Essays, 1588



Be like the bird that, passing on her flight awhile on boughs too slight, feels them give way beneath her, and yet sings, knowing that she hath wings. ~Victor Hugo



A woman seldom writes her Mind, but in her Postscript. ~Richard Steele, Spectator



No one can understand love who has not experienced infatuation. And no one can understand infatuation, no matter how many times he has experienced it. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960



Nothing splendid has ever been achieved except by those who dared believe that something inside of them was superior to circumstance. ~Bruce Barton



How fair is a garden amid the trials and passions of existence. ~Benjamin Disraeli



In spite of the six thousand manuals on child raising in the bookstores, child raising is still a dark continent and no one really knows anything. You just need a lot of love and luck - and, of course, courage. ~Bill Cosby, Fatherhood, 1986



I think in terms of the day's resolutions, not the years'. ~Henry Moore



If you wish to make an apple pie truly from scratch, you must first invent the universe. ~Carl Sagan



Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion. ~C. Northcote Parkinson, 1958



This was one of those perfect New England days in late summer where the spirit of autumn takes a first stealing flight, like a spy, through the ripening country-side, and, with feigned sympathy for those who droop with August heat, puts her cool cloak of bracing air about leaf and flower and human shoulders. ~Sarah Orne Jewett



There are many in this old world of ours who hold that things break about even for all of us. I have observed for example that we all get the same amount of ice. The rich get it in the summertime and the poor get it in the winter. ~Bat Masterson



Often the difference between a successful marriage and a mediocre one consists of leaving about three or four things a day unsaid. ~Harlan Miller



Every American child should grow up knowing a second language, preferably English. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960



Platitude: a banal or stale remark; a commonplace or trite remark or idea, especially one uttered as if it were original or momentous.



"Independence"... is middle-class blasphemy. We are all dependent on one another, every soul of us on earth. ~G.B. Shaw, Pygmalion, 1912



If the anti-abortion movement took a tenth of the energy they put into noisy theatrics and devoted it to improving the lives of children who have been born into lives of poverty, violence, and neglect, they could make a world shine. ~Michael Jay Tucker



Nature gave men two ends - one to sit on and one to think with. Ever since then man's success or failure has been dependent on the one he used most. ~George R. Kirkpatrick