Tennyson Quotes

“The seasonal urge is strong in poets. Milton wrote chiefly in winter. Keats looked for spring to wake him up (as it did in the miraculous months of April and May, 1819). Burns chose autumn. Longfellow liked the month of September. Shelley flourished in the hot months. Some poets, like Wordsworth, have gone outdoors to work. Others, like Auden, keep to the curtained room. Schiller needed the smell of rotten apples about him to make a poem. Tennyson and Walter de la Mare had to smoke. Auden drinks lots of tea, Spender coffee; Hart Crane drank alcohol. Pope, Byron, and William Morris were creative late at night. And so it goes.”
― Helen Bevington, When Found, Make a Verse of

“For this alone on Death I wreak
The wrath that garners in my heart:
He put our lives so far apart
We cannot hear each other speak.”
― Alfred Lord Tennyson "In Memoriam A.H.H."

“Behold, we know not anything;
I can but trust that good shall fall
At last -- far off -- at last, to all,
And every winter change to spring.”
― Alfred Lord Tennyson

“Mr Wisdom,' said the girl who had led him into the presence.
'Ah,' said Howard Saxby, and there was a pause of perhaps three minutes, during which his needles clicked busily. 'Wisdom, did she say?'
'Yes. I wrote "Cocktail Time"'
'You couldn't have done better,' said Mr Saxby cordially. 'How's your wife, Mr Wisdom?'
Cosmo said he had no wife.
'Surely?'
"I'm a bachelor.'
Then Wordsworth was wrong. He said you were married to immortal verse. Excuse me a moment,' murmured Mr Saxby, applying himself to the sock again. 'I'm just turning the heel. Do you knit?'
'No.'
'Sleep does. It knits the ravelled sleave of care.'

(After a period of engrossed knitting, Cosmo coughs loudly to draw attention to his presence.)
'Goodness, you made me jump!' he (Saxby) said. 'Who are you?'
'My name, as I have already told you, is Wisdom'
'How did you get in?' asked Mr Saxby with a show of interest.
'I was shown in.'
'And stayed in. I see, Tennyson was right. Knowledge comes, but Wisdom lingers. Take a chair.'
'I have.'
'Take another,' said Mr Saxby hospitably.”
― P.G. Wodehouse

“As your older brother, it's my sacred duty to save you from yourself."

She brings her fists down on the table, making all the dinner plates jump. "The ONLY reason you're fifteen minutes older than me is because you cut in front of the line, as usual!”
― Neal Shusterman, Bruiser

“Matched with an aged wife, I mete and dole
Unequal laws unto a savage race,
That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.”
― Alfred Lord Tennyson

“For always roaming with a hungry heart / Much have I seen and known.”
― Alfred, Lord Tennyson

“Then you'd better listen, because me sounding like Bronte is one of the signs of the apocalypse-and if the end fo the world is coming, good deeds could earn you Judgment day brownie points.”
― Neal Shusterman, Bruiser

“We have The Idylls of the King in English class this term. I like some things in them, but I detest Tennyson's Arthur. If I had been Guinevere I'd have boxed his ears - but I wouldn't have been unfaithful to him for Lancelot, who was just as odious in a different way. As for Geraint, if I had been Enid I'd have bitten him. These 'patient Griseldas' deserve all they get.”
― L.M. Montgomery, Emily Climbs

“I turn to our father, searching for an ally. "So Dad, is it legal for Bronte to date out of her species?"

Dad looks up from his various layers of pepperoni and breadless cheese. "Date?" he says. Apparently the idea of Bronte dating is like an electromagnet sucking away all other words in the sentence, so that's the only word he hears.

"You're not funny," Bronte says to me.

"No, I'm serious," I tell her. "Isn't he like... a Sasquatch or something?"

"Date?" says Dad.”
― Neal Shusterman, Bruiser

“...you are my Lady of Shalott lost in a dream of isolation - I care too much for you - I romanticize depression...”
― John Geddes, A Familiar Rain

“Whatever is silenced will clamor to be heard, though silently. A Tennyson garden, heavy with scent, languid; the return of the word swoon.”
― Margaret Atwood The Handmaid's Tale

“The kind of poetry to avoid in the pretty-pretty kind that pleased our grandmothers, the kind that Longfellow and Tennyson, good poets at their best, wrote at their worst.”
― Clifton Fadiman, Clifton Fadiman's Fireside Reader

“Her problem is with pretty,” Tennyson said. "She thinks I’ll need all these dresses in college. Like I would ever in a billion years pledge a sorority. I’ll pack a few of these to be ironic, though. I can wear them to, like, truck stops at night with mascara running down my cheeks and stuff.”
― Laura Anderson Kurk, Perfect Glass

“Chemistry has the same quickening and suggestive influence upon the algebraist as a visit to the Royal Academy, or the old masters may be supposed to have on a Browning or a Tennyson. Indeed it seems to me that an exact homology exists between painting and poetry on the one hand and modem chemistry and modem algebra on the other. In poetry and algebra we have the pure idea elaborated and expressed through the vehicle of language, in painting and chemistry the idea enveloped in matter, depending in part on manual processes and the resources of art for its due manifestation.”
― James Joseph Sylvester

“If I were loved, as I desire to be, / What is there in the great sphere of the earth, / And range of evil between death and birth, / That I should fear,- if I were loved by thee?”
― Kate Morton, The Clockmaker's Daughter

“There hath he lain for ages, and will lie
Battening upon huge sea worms in his sleep,
Until the latter fire shall heat the deep;
Then once by man and angels to be seen,
In roaring he shall rise and on the surface die.”
― Alfred Lord Tennyson

“I only remember fighting Ozzy O'Dell once. It was back in second grade. He threw these weird windmill-like punches, which was probably an early sign that the swim team was in his future.”
― Neal Shusterman, Bruiser

“And so there grew great tracts of wilderness, Wherin the beast was ever more and more, But man was less and less, till Arthur came.”
― Alfred Lord Tennyson, Idylls of the King: By Alfred Lord Tennyson - Illustrated

“Where willows whiten, aspens quiver, little breezes dusk and shiver...'"
I was unfamiliar with Tennyson at that time, thought only that she produced a rather pretty description of the lake.”
― Kate Morton, The House at Riverton

“The Sea-fairies

Slow sail'd the weary mariners and saw,
Betwixt the green brink and the running foam, Sweet faces, rounded arms, and bosoms prest To little harps of gold; and while they mused, Whispering to each other half in fear,
Shrill music reach'd them on the middle sea.”
― Alfred Lord Tennyson

“...the city usually only dulled and interrupted him. He required quiet, and to keep himself to himself, more than any writer he’d known. He was a shy beast who loved his burrow.”
― Matthew Pearl, The Dante Chamber

“When critics like Matthew Arnold, for example, suggest that his poetry is deficient in elaborate thought, they only prove, as Matthew Arnold proved, that they themselves could never be great poets. It is no valid accusation against a poet that the sentiment he expresses is commonplace. Poetry is always commonplace; it is vulgar in the noblest sense of that noble word. Unless a man can make the same kind of ringing appeal to absolute and admitted sentiments that is made by a popular orator, he has lost touch with emotional literature. Unless he is to some extent a demagogue, he cannot be a poet. A man who expresses in poetry new and strange and undiscovered emotions is not a poet; he is a brain specialist. Tennyson can never be discredited before any serious tribunal of criticism because the sentiments and thoughts to which he dedicates himself are those sentiments and thoughts which occur to anyone. These are the peculiar province of poetry; poetry, like religion, is always a democratic thing, even if it pretends the contrary.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“There was, again, another poetic element entirely peculiar to Tennyson, which his critics have, in many cases, ridiculously confused with a fault. This was the fact that Tennyson stood alone among modern poets in the attempt to give a poetic character to the conception of Liberal Conservatism, of splendid compromise. The carping critics who have abused Tennyson for this do not see that it was far more daring and original for a poet to defend conventionality than to defend a cart-load of revolutions. His really sound and essential conception of Liberty,

"Turning to scorn with lips divine
The falsehood of extremes,"

is as good a definition of Liberalism as has been uttered in poetry in the Liberal century. Moderation is not a compromise; moderation is a passion; the passion of great judges. That Tennyson felt that lyrical enthusiasm could be devoted to established customs, to indefensible and ineradicable national constitutions, to the dignity of time and the empire of unutterable common sense, all this did not make him a tamer poet, but an infinitely more original one. Any poetaster can describe a thunderstorm; it requires a poet to describe the ancient and quiet sky.”
― G.K. Chesterton