Famous quotes containing the word cease:
“Oh, the holiness of always being the injured party. The historically oppressed can find not only sanctity but safety in the state of victimization. When access to a better life has been denied often enough, and successfully enough, one can use the rejection as an excuse to cease all efforts. After all, one reckons, “they” don’t want me, “they” accept their own mediocrity and refuse my best, “they” don’t deserve me.”
—Maya Angelou (b. 1928)
“In honored poverty thy voice did weave
Songs consecrate to truth and liberty;—
Deserting these, thou leavest me to grieve,
Thus having been, that thou shouldst cease to be.”
—Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822)
“I cease my song for thee,
From my gaze on thee in the west, fronting the west, communing with thee,
O comrade lustrous with silver face in the night.
Yet each to keep and all, retrievements out of the night,
The song, the wondrous chant of the grey-brown bird,
And the tallying chant, the echo aroused in my soul,
With the lustrous and drooping star with the countenance full of woe,”
—Walt Whitman (1819–1892)