Famous quotes containing the words birth, rate and/or decline:
“For birth was a disease and Christopher and I invented the cure.”
—Anne Sexton (19281974)
“I dont know but a book in a mans brain is better off than a book bound in calfat any rate it is safer from criticism. And taking a book off the brain, is akin to the ticklish & dangerous business of taking an old painting off a panelyou have to scrape off the whole brain in order to get at it with due safety& even then, the painting may not be worth the trouble.”
—Herman Melville (18191891)
“Or else I thought her supernatural;
As though a sterner eye looked through her eye
On this foul world in its decline and fall,
On gangling stocks grown great, great stocks run dry,
Ancestral pearls all pitched into a sty,
Heroic reverie mocked by clown and knave....”
—William Butler Yeats (18651939)