Edna St. Vincent Millay

"There is no significant exemplification of excellence as there is of mediocrity."

"I will not make you promises I cannot keep."

"What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why, I have forgotten."

"We cannot all be heroes, but we can all be authors of our own small stories."

"Absence from those we love is self-exile."

"Time cannot be long in a place where all is perfect."

"I have a rendezvous with death and I will keep it."

"It is easy to believe in freedom abroad; it is harder to believe in it at home."

"A person who publishes a book appears willfully in front of the world."

"There is one art of which I am ambitious: to make people happy."

"The heart asks pleasure first, and then, excuse from pain."

"What do women want? We want the world, and we want it now."

"I have loved badly, unwisely, but perhaps not less."

"Music all along was school and play."

"The rain washed clean the sidewalk and left it shining."

"Wonder is not precisely knowing and not precisely not knowing."

"She loves with all the intensity that a woman of her time can muster."

"I wonder, by my troth, what thou and I did till we loved."

"Beauty is the only thing worth pursuing in this savage world."

"Safe upon the solid rock the ugly houses stand; come and see my shining palace built upon the sand."

"To hold a hand in darkness is to understand all of human nature."

"I have shed my youth like a snake sheds its skin."

"The world is always ending, and the world is always being reborn."

"What is this thing that builds our dreams yet slips away?"

"I have loved truly, even when it cost me everything."

"The grave is the only certainty we possess before birth."

"I am what time made me, no more and no less."

"Fear is the one thing that keeps us from being truly alive."

"I shall gather myself into myself again."

"A woman needs independence like a tree needs roots."