Cecil Day Lewis

Famous quotes containing the words cecil day lewis, cecil day, day and/or lewis:

    “We’d like to fight but we fear defeat,
    We’d like to work but we’re feeling too weak,
    We’d like to be sick but we’d get the sack,
    We’d like to behave, we’d like to believe,
    We’d like to love, but we’ve lost the knack.”
    —Cecil Day Lewis (1904–1972)

    “Nearing again the legendary isle
    Where sirens sang and mariners were skinned,
    We wonder now what was there to beguile
    That such stout fellows left their bones behind.”
    —Cecil Day Lewis (1904–1972)

    “There is something else which has the power to awaken us to the truth. It is the works of writers of genius.... They give us, in the guise of fiction, something equivalent to the actual density of the real, that density which life offers us every day but which we are unable to grasp because we are amusing ourselves with lies.”
    —Simone Weil (1909–1943)

    “If kangaroos had no tails, they would topple over seems to me to mean something like this: in any possible state of affairs in which kangaroos have no tails, and which resembles our actual state of affairs as much as kangaroos having no tails permits it to, the kangaroos topple over.”
    —David Lewis (b. 1941)