Christiana Rossetti Quotes

No sooner have you feasted on beauty with your eyes than your mind tells you that beauty is vain and beauty passes ~ Virginia Woolf

When I am dead, my dearest,
Sing no sad songs for me ~ Christina Rossetti

A Pause of Thought

I looked for that which is not, nor can be,
And hope deferred made my heart sick in truth
But years must pass before a hope of youth
Is resigned utterly.

I watched and waited with a steadfast will:
And though the object seemed to flee away
That I so longed for, ever day by day
I watched and waited still.

Sometimes I said: This thing shall be no more;
My expectation wearies and shall cease;
I will resign it now and be at peace:
Yet never gave it o'er.

Sometimes I said: It is an empty name
I long for; to a name why should I give
The peace of all the days I have to live?--
Yet gave it all the same.

Alas, thou foolish one! alike unfit
For healthy joy and salutary pain:
Thou knowest the chase useless, and again
Turnest to follow it. ~ Christina Rossetti

A fool I was to sleep at noon,
And wake when night is chilly
Beneath the comfortless cold moon;
A fool to pluck my rose too soon,
A fool to snap my lily.
My garden-plot I have not kept;
Faded and all-forsaken,
I weep as I have never wept:
Oh it was summer when I slept,
It's winter now I waken.
Talk what you please of future spring
And sun-warm'd sweet to-orrow:
Stripp'd bare of hope and everything,
No more to laugh, no more to sing,
I sit alone with sorrow. ~ Christina Rossetti

Ah me, but where are now the songs I sang
When life was sweet because you call'd them sweet? ~ Christina Rossetti

In the bleak midwinter
Frosty wind made moan,
Earth stood hard as iron,
Water like a stone;
Snow had fallen,
Snow on snow,
Snow on snow,
In the bleak midwinter,
Long ago. ~ Christina Rossetti

We have already used more than half of that budget. This means that three quarters of the fossil fuel reserves need to stay in the ground, and the fossil fuels we do use must be utilized sparingly and responsibly. ~ Christiana Figueres

Flint


An emerald is as green as grass,
A ruby red as blood;
A sapphire shines as blue as heaven;
A flint lies in the mud.
A diamond is a brilliant stone,
To catch the world's desire;
An opal holds a fiery spark;
But a flint holds fire. ~ Christina Rossetti

Christiana as much as I still love you and never wished for our marriage to end, you were, you are and will always be a Barrington. Your father has seen to that her ex-husband bristled ~ Peggy Hattendorf

The downhill path is easy, but there's no turning back ... ~ Christina Rossetti

Spring's an expansive time: yet I don't trust
March with its peck of dust,
Nor April with its rainbow-crowned brief showers,
Nor even May, whose flowers
One frost may wither thro' the sunless hours. ~ Christina Rossetti

Connect with people, visibly and loudly showcase initiatives that reduce greenhouse gases emissions, nurture youth leaders, or spread the message by raising awareness through campaigns. I am convinced that your contributions will ensure that climate change solutions safely power our - and especially your - future. ~ Christiana Figueres

Fallen from sonship, beggared of grace,
Grant me. Father, a servant's place. ~ Christina Rossetti

Were there no God, we would be in this glorious world with grateful hearts, and no one thank. ~ Christina Rossetti

Hope is like a hairball trembling from its birth ... ~ Christina Rossetti

Where innocent bright-eyes daisies are With blades of grass between, Each daisy stands up like a star Out of a sky of green. ~ Christina Rossetti

The hours I spent in this anachronistic, bibliophile, Anglophile retreat were in surreal contrast to the shrieking horror show that was being enacted in the rest of the city. I never felt this more acutely than when, having maneuvered the old boy down the spiral staircase for a rare out-of-doors lunch the next day - terrified of letting him slip and tumble - I got him back upstairs again. He invited me back for even more readings the following morning but I had to decline. I pleaded truthfully that I was booked on a plane for Chile. 'I am so sorry,' said this courteous old genius. 'But may I then offer you a gift in return for your company?' I naturally protested with all the energy of an English middle-class upbringing: couldn't hear of such a thing; pleasure and privilege all mine; no question of accepting any present. He stilled my burblings with an upraised finger. 'You will remember,' he said, 'the lines I will now speak. You will always remember them.' And he then recited the following:

What man has bent o'er his son's sleep, to brood
How that face shall watch his when cold it lies?
Or thought, as his own mother kissed his eyes,
Of what her kiss was when his father wooed?
The title (Sonnet XXIX of Dante Gabriel Rossetti) - 'Inclusiveness' - may sound a trifle sickly but the enfolded thought recurred to me more than once after I became a father and Borges was quite right: I have never had to remind myself of the words. I was mumbling my tha ~ Christopher Hitchens

My heart is like a singing bird. ~ Christina Rossetti

This sunlight shames November where he grieves
In dead red leaves, and will not let him shun
The day, though bough with bough be overrun.
But with a blessing every glade receives
High salutation. ~ Dante Gabriel Rossetti

The record-breaking extreme weather events causing chaos across the globe should be a wake-up call. The transition to a low-carbon economy will be much more painful if we wait until there is a climate crisis before recognising that more than half of the world's fossil fuel reserves will have to remain in the ground. ~ Christiana Figueres

The rose saith in the dewy morn,
I am most fair;
Yet all my loveliness is born
Upon a thorn. ~ Christina Rossetti

It is not the deed we do Though the deed be never so fair, But the love that the dear Lord looketh for, Hidden with lovely care In the heart of the deed so fair. ~ Christina Rossetti

Then I got to my feet, and, taking my arms, he drew me out of my picture frame, into the darkness and the heat, to a place where the ground was frighteningly, thrillingly far away, and the sunless sky was burning and trembling all around us. ~ Rinsai Rossetti

For I have hedged me with a thorny hedge,
I live alone, I look to die alone:
Yet sometimes, when a wind sighs through the sedge,
Ghosts of my buried years, and friends come back,
My heart goes sighing after swallows flown
On sometime summer's unreturning track. ~ Christina Rossetti

Oh that it were with me
As with the flower;
Blooming on its own tree
For butterfly and bee
Its summer morns:
That I might bloom mine hour
A rose in spite of thorns.
Oh that my work were done
As birds' that soar
Rejoicing in the sun:
That when my time is run
And daylight too,
I so might rest once more
Cool with refreshing dew. ~ Christina Rossetti

So tired am I, so weary of to-day,
So unrefreshed from foregone weariness,
So overburdened by foreseen distress,
So lagging and so stumbling on my way,
I scarce can rouse myself to watch or pray,
To hope, or aim, or toil for more or less,--
Ah, always less and less, even while I press
Forward and toil and aim as best I may.
Half-starved of soul and heartsick utterly,
Yet lift I up my heart and soul and eyes
Which fail in looking upward ~ Christina Rossetti

So Spring comes merry towards me here, but earns
No answering smile from me, whose life is twin'd
With the dead boughs that winter still must bind,
And whom today the Spring no more concerns.
Behold, this crocus is a withering flame;
This snowdrop, snow; this apple-blossom's part
To breed the fruit that breeds the serpent's art.
Nay, for these Spring-flowers, turn thy face from them,
Nor stay till on the year's last lily-stem
The white cup shrivels round the golden heart. ~ Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Quite frankly, there is no answer to climate change without substantially, dramatically, increasing the amount of renewable energy in the global energy system. ~ Christiana Figueres

Mystics find themselves delighted in being surprised again and again by the many loving manifestations of God . . . "Surprise" is one of the hallmarks of a true manifestation of the divine. This may be because God wants us to learn and relearn more deeply that his presence is a gift that cannot be earned or controlled. Or, it may simply be that God wants to surprise his beloved. ~ Stephen J. Rossetti

We cannot ask others to do what we have not done ourselves. ~ Christiana Figueres

Morning and evening
Maids heard the goblins cry:
'Come buy our orchard fruits,
Come buy, come buy ~ Christina Rossetti

Because no windows were open and the air was so still and cold that the trees dared not move for fear of encountering more of it than they had to, Christiana thought that she had entered a city of the dead. ~ Mark Helprin

Can anything be sadder than work left unfinished? Yes, work never begun. ~ Christina Rossetti

Observe this dew-drenched rose of Tyrian gardens A rose today. But you will ask in vain Tomorrow what it is; and yesterday It was the dust, the sunshine, and the rains. ~ Christina Rossetti

To me it seems our duty towards the Bible is to obey its teaching in faith. I do not think we are bound to understand or account for all its utterances. ~ Christina Rossetti

Remember
Remember me when I am gone away,
Gone far away into the silent land;
When you can no more hold me by the hand,
Nor I half turn to go yet turning stay.
Remember me when no more, day by day,
You tell me of our future that you planned:
Only remember me; you understand
It will be late to counsel then or pray.
Yet if you should forget me for a while
And afterwards remember, do not grieve:
For if the darkness and corruption leave
A vestige of the thoughts that once I had,
Better by far you should forget and smile
Than that you should remember and be sad. ~ Christina Rossetti

From Vergil's Tenth Eclogue

Verses 1-26.

Published by Rossetti, "Complete Poetical Works of P. B. S.", 1870, from the Boscombe manuscripts now in the Bodleian. Mr. Locock ("Examination", etc., 1903, pages 47-50), as the result of his collation of the same manuscripts, gives a revised and expanded version which we print below.
Melodious Arethusa, o'er my verse
Shed thou once more the spirit of thy stream:
Who denies verse to Gallus? So, when thou
Glidest beneath the green and purple gleam
Of Syracusan waters, mayst thou flow
Unmingled with the bitter Doric dew!
Begin, and, whilst the goats are browsing now
The soft leaves, in our way let us pursue
The melancholy loves of Gallus. List!
We sing not to the dead: the wild woods knew
His sufferings, and their echoes...
Young Naiads,...in what far woodlands wild
Wandered ye when unworthy love possessed
Your Gallus? Not where Pindus is up-piled,
Nor where Parnassus' sacred mount, nor where
Aonian Aganippe expands...
The laurels and the myrtle-copses dim.
The pine-encircled mountain, Maenalus,
The cold crags of Lycaeus, weep for him;
And Sylvan, crowned with rustic coronals,
Came shaking in his speed the budding wands
And heavy lilies which he bore: we knew
Pan the Arcadian.

...

'What madness is this, Gallus? Thy heart's care
With willing steps pursues another there ~ Percy Bysshe Shelley

And sometimes I remember days of old
When fellowship seemed not so far to seek,
And all the world and I seemed much less cold,
And at the rainbow's foot lay surely gold,
And hope felt strong, and life itself not weak. ~ Christina Rossetti