The Ballad Of Reading Gaol Quotes

Ah! Happy they whose hearts can break
And peace of pardon win!
How else may man make straight his path
And cleanse his soul from sin?
How else but through a broken heart
May the Lord Christ enter in? ~ Oscar Wilde

Although Lewis Carroll thought of The Hunting of the Snark as a nonsense ballad for children, it is hard to imagine - in fact one shudders to imagine - a child of today reading and enjoying it. ~ Martin Gardner

THE BALLAD OF READING GOAL: The vilest deeds, like poison weeds, Bloom well in prison air; It is only what is good in Man That wastes and withers there. Pale Anguish keeps the heavy gate, And the Warder is Despair. ~ Emma Goldman

And see ye not that braid braid road
That lies across that lily leven?
That is the path of wickedness
Though some call it the road to heaven ~ Walter Scott

Worse, in the video for it (which is also played everywhere constantly), Boris is singing to a girl who is dying in a hospital bed, and Boris is telling her (lyrically) that he'll give her a million stars (plus his love) if she'll find the strength within herself to not die, and love him forever.
Of course the girl is so moved by this hot rocker dude's amazing song that she doesn't die. Because it is a medical fact that people with fatal diseases only need a hot rocker dude to sit on the edge of their hospital bed and sing them a rock ballad in order to give them the strength to go on living. ~ Meg Cabot

Who claims Truth, Truth abandons. History is hir'd, or coerc'd, only in Interests that must ever prove base. She is too innocent, to be left within the reach of anyone in Power,- who need but touch her, and all her Credit is in the instant vanish'd, as if it had never been. She needs rather to be tended lovingly and honorably by fabulists and counterfeiters, Ballad-Mongers and Cranks of ev'ry Radius, Masters of Disguise to provide her the Costume, Toilette, and Bearing, and Speech nimble enough to keep her beyond the Desires, or even the Curiosity, of Government. ~ Thomas Pynchon

If I could write an autobiography for fear, it would read like this:
__________

Hi, my name is Fear. F-E-A-R. But you are going to call me a lot of other things as you start to get closer to me. I'm terribly unoriginal. I'm like every has-been out there, but you give me way more credit than I deserve. You should keep doing that. I like it when you make me bigger than I actually am. I'm going to make you feel alone, and I like it when you believe you're the only one who's ever felt this way. You think I'm custom-catered to fit you, but I'm really no different than the brand of me your best friend wears. I'm a ballad lurking in the hearts of a billion people, and I will do anything to keep you from realizing that I am just the same song on repeat. You all know all my words.
I'm pretty jealous though. I want you alone with me at night. I'm not afraid to say I'm greedy or that I don't want to share you. I'm a territorial lover, and I would rather you not have solid and deep conversations at dinner parties or find a community that doesn't leave your side. I wrote you a story a long time ago, and I don't want you to figure out that you've outgrown the plotline.
I wonder why you don't get over me sometimes, but then the realization hits me: You come back because you know I want you. You come back because you know the sound of my voice. You come back because you know the way I move and how I shut you down. You've stood face-to-face with me so many times and ~ Hannah Brencher

That innate love of melody, which she had inherited from her ballad-singing mother, gave the simplest music a power which could well-nigh drag her heart out of her bosom at times. ~ Thomas Hardy

I compelled myself all through to write an exercise in verse, in a different form, every day of the year. I turned out my page every day, of some sort
I mean I didn't give a damn about the meaning, I just wanted to master the form
all the way from free verse, Walt Whitman, to the most elaborate of villanelles and ballad forms. Very good training. I've always told everybody who has ever come to me that I thought that was the first thing to do. ~ Conrad Aiken

When in Reading Gaol he told me that the warders in the dock had been gentle and kind, but the visit of the chaplain in his first prison began with these words:
'Mr. Wilde, did you have morning prayers in your house?'
'I am sorry ... I fear not.'
'You see where you are now! ~ Charles Ricketts

Kato's expression shifts into something I could almost call a smile for the first time since I found him. He plucks the chordsagain in the beginnings of a tune I recognize, a ballad popular in southern Sinta. His fingers move with skill and subtlety over the strings. I had no idea he was musical.

"Maybe we're not meant to kill it." He keeps playing. "Doesn't music soothe the beast? I'll play, you sing."

"I sound like a strangled Satyr when I sing."

He smiles. "Somehow that doesn't surprise me."

"There's no need for mudslinging," I say with a huff.

He chuckles softly. "I can carry a tune."

"Great!" I pat his arm. "That'll be your job. I'll stand back - waaaaay back - while you calm the beast. I'm confident you'll sound as good as you look."

His chest puffs out. "How do I look?"

"Terrible." I grin. "You needed a bath, a shave, and a comb before we even set foot on the Ice Plains. Now, I can just barely make out your eyes and your nose. The rest is all" - I flap my hands around - "hair."

His chest deflates. He eyes me wryly. "I could say the same about you."

I gasp. "I grew a beard? Do you think Griffin will like it? I've been trying to keep it neat, but I may have picked up an eel."

Kato laughs outright, and he really is unbearably handsome. Some of the grimness evaporates from his eyes. "I was talking about this." He gives one of my tousled waves a light tug ~ Amanda Bouchet

You, my dear ... have been wondering why she stuck with him. Although you haven't said as much, it's been on your mind. Am I right?'
She nodded.
'Yes. And I'm not going to offer a long motivational thesis - the convenient thing about stories that are true is that you need only say this is what happened and let people worry for themselves about why. Generally, nobody ever knows why things happen anyway ... particularly the ones who say they do. (Ballad of the Flexible Bullet) ~ Stephen King

Light - both physical and moral - was a central concern to the men and women living in the medieval age. They attempted to explore its properties in the colors of a stained glass canopy, in the tenor of a brisk saltarello, in the lilt of a Jongleur's ballad, in the sweet savor of a banqueting table, in the rhapsody of a well planned garden, indeed, in every arena and discipline of life. ~ Douglas Wilson Douglas Jones

So we wait?" asked Severard.
"We wait, and we look to our defences. That and we try to find some money. Do you have any cash, Severard?"
"I did have some. I gave it to a girl, down in the slums."
"Ah. Shame."
"Not really, she fucks like a madman. I'd thoroughly recommend her, if you're interested."
Glokta winced as his knee clicked. "What a thoroughly heartwarming tale, Severard, I never had you down for a romantic. I'd sing a ballad if I wasn't so short of funds."
"I could ask around. How much are we talking about?"
"Oh, not much. Say, half a million marks?"
One of the Practical's eyebrows went up sharply. He reached into his pocket, dug around for a moment, pulled his hand out and opened it. A few copper coins shone in his palm.
"Twelve bits," he said. "Twelve bits is all I can raise. ~ Joe Abercrombie

A Ballad of Going Down to the Store

First I went down to the street
by means of the stairs,
just imagine it,
by means of the stairs.

Then people known to people unknown
passed me by and I passed them by.
Regret
that you did not see
how people walk,
regret!

I entered a complete store:
lamps of glass were glowing.
I saw somebody - he sat down -
and what did I hear? what did I hear?
rustling of bags and human talk.

And indeed,
indeed,
I returned.

--Miron Bialoszewski (Poland, 1922-1983) ~ Ilya Kaminsky

Like the old soldier of the ballad, I now close my military career and just fade away, an old soldier who tried to do his duty as God gave him the light to see that duty. Goodbye. ~ Douglas MacArthur

They think in terms of a sentimental ballad. And that's what terrifies you about them. It isn't their cruelty, it isn't even their shrewdness - it's their extraordinary naivete. Everything in their whole bloody world is a cliche. Everything is born out of a cliche, rests on a cliche, survives by a cliche. And they believe in the cliches - there's no hope ~ Jean Rhys

This summer-sweet night is only one minute upon one minute upon another
Beautiful cacophony, sugar upon lips, dancing to exhaustion
I thought of you, before this minute upon another minute upon another
Until, numb, my lips fell onto the mouth of another, and I was undone.

~from Golden Tongue: The Poems of Steven Slaughter which is a fictional book in
Ballad: A gathering of faerie ~ Maggie Stiefvater

Street Ballad

From high above the birds look down and sing because
they see
the monstrous comedies they miss, living several storeys
higher:
the dirty degradations and the gross humiliations,
they, like the gods, without pity, look down upon from a
telephone wire.

but as they sit there high above and gaze down upon our
brutal
short and messy circumstances, they do not see the one
who stands behind a cardboard tree examining them
coldly
with one eye closed and the other staring along the barrel
of a gun. ~ George Barker

He was a strong and noble lord with piercing eyes of grey.
He sat upon his noble throne shining like the dawn.
His sword flashed like the brightest star.
He led our people well.
Yet here and now he lays in blood pierced with arrows.
He was the friend of many knights.
He loved the warrior games.
His heart was won by a lady fair for marriage they did wait.
A kindly prince, his duty carried him to another's bed.
And on her death true love returned, finally they wed.
He felt the grief of children lost to murder and to pain.
I was the youngest of his blood.
I'll never be the same.
Here lays my father and my lord.
I know not what to say.
Except my father and my lord was slain here on this day.
Here lays my father and my lord.
I know not what to say.
Except my father and my lord was slain here on this day ... . ~ Laurel A. Rockefeller

The Ballad of Lucy Jordan
The morning sun touched lightly on the eyes of Lucy Jordan
In a white suburban bedroom in a white suburban town
As she lay there 'neath the covers dreaming of a thousand lovers
Till the world turned to orange and the room went spinning round.

At the age of thirty-seven she realised she'd never
Ride through Paris in a sports car with the warm wind in her hair.
So she let the phone keep ringing and she sat there softly singing
Little nursery rhymes she'd memorised in her daddy's easy chair.

Her husband, he's off to work and the kids are off to school,
And there are, oh, so many ways for her to spend the day.
She could clean the house for hours or rearrange the flowers
Or run naked through the shady street screaming all the way.

At the age of thirty-seven she realised she'd never
Ride through Paris in a sports car with the warm wind in her hair
So she let the phone keep ringing as she sat there softly singing
Pretty nursery rhymes she'd memorised in her daddy's easy chair.

The evening sun touched gently on the eyes of Lucy Jordan
On the roof top where she climbed when all the laughter grew too loud
And she bowed and curtsied to the man who reached and offered her his hand,
And he led her down to the long white car that waited past the crowd.

At the age of thirty-seven she knew she'd found forever
As she rode along t ~ Marianne Faithfull

On a long journey to Glen-Stone
Isailed into its shade
there before me she proudly shone
my decision was already made.
A lass who bore the light of the town
her fur of ivory thread
how she danced is stuck in my crown
and back to this glen my boat led.
Twenty some seasons have since passed
since her eyes and mine both met
through lands unnamed and wildly vast
my blade slaying every threat
Wolf, hawk, fox, and snake
can't stand in my way
my body is weak and it may break,
but not today.
Living in blackness wrought with fright
my steel shattered facing the foes
dusks and dawns darker than night
my fallen companions in rows
Life spilled past me staining the ground
mylimbs growing ever so cold
above villians let out a cackiling sound
telling me i'd never grow old
One dance and one mouse played in my mind
calling me back from the doom
the courage to carry on i did find
to raise me out of my tomb
Wolf, hawk, fox, and snake
can't stand in my way
my body is weak and it may break
though not today
Battered and bruised i stood to my paws
raised what little i owned
predators growled caring not for my cause
of the mouse that shone light off Glen-stone
Wolf, hawk, fox, and snake
can't tand in my way
my body is weak and it may break
though not today. -The Ballad Of The Ivory Lass ~ David Petersen

I played a few rough versions of songs while Chad sat by, looking lost. Mia came in wearing black leather pants and a tight sweater. As I strummed the Gibson, she made her way over to the piano. She smiled and threw her hand up, waving to Chad. He smiled back and then I watched him study her as she passed. Then his dipshit, googly eyes dropped to her ass while she moved the piano bench out.

When he looked back at me, I glared at him and began strumming a dreary and much louder tune. His body sank into his chair and he dropped his head down to stare at his fidgeting hands. Mia began playing a sullen little melody in an attempt to accompany the monotonous song I was forming, and then she stopped abruptly and turned toward me.

I continued playing.

"Is this going to be a ballad?" she asked.

Without taking my eyes off of dipshit, I said, "No, baby, this is what's called a funeral march."

Chad threw his arms up and said, "I get it. I get it. I'm sorry."

"Sorry for what?" Mia asked.

"Nothing!" Chad and I both shouted.

"Let's move on," I said, arching one eyebrow at him.

Chad kept his eyes trained on either the ground or me through the rest of the session ~ Renee Carlino

The farmer's daughter hath soft brown hair And I met with a ballad, I can't say where, That wholly consisted of lines like these. ~ Charles Stuart Calverley

During the 'ballad' years for me, the politics was latent; I was just falling in love with the ballads and my boyfriend. And there was the beauty of the songs. ~ Joan Baez

Then a soft air, a simple melody, rose to the ears of the suddenly hushed court; and for me, it was May Day again, and I was no longer cold, for the sun burned bright and the grass smelled of its sour-sweet bruisings and an old man fashioned a ballad for the Nut-Brown maid, who would ever be true to her lover. I leaned towards the brightness and, in an abandonment of joy and because there was none to see, tore off my henin and let my nut-brown hair fall to my knees. For I would be a child again, for five minutes, and remember the time when men stopped to gaze at me, with my chaplet of flowers crowning that at which they all marvelled, and longed to touch and stroke and possess. ~ Rosemary Hawley Jarman

Between the sleeping and the waking, it is there.

Between the rising and the resting, it is there.

It is always there.

It gnaws on my heart. It chews on my soul.

I turn aside and see it. I stop my ears and hear it. I cover myself and feel it.

There are no human words for what I mean.

It is the language of the bare bough and the cold stone, pronounced in the fell wind's sullen whisper and the metronomic drip-drip of the rain. It is the song the falling snow sings and the discordant clamour of sunlight ripped apart by the canopy and miserly filtered down.

It is what the unseeing eye sees. It is what the deaf ear heres.

It is the romantic ballad of death's embrace; the solemn hymn of offal dripping from bloody teeth; the lamentation of the bloated corpse rotting in the sun; the graceful ballet of maggots twisting in the ruins of God's temple.

Here in this gray land, we have no name. We are the carcasses reflected in the yellow eye.

Our bones are bleached within our skin; our empty sockets regard the crow.

Here in this shadow country, our tiny voices scratch like a fly's wing against unmoving air.

Ours is the language of imbeciles, the gibberish of idiots. The root and the vine have more to say than us. ~ Rick Yancey

The people who live happily ever after - they don't appear in the history books. They just fade away. I reckon that's what happiness is.
Pauline Foster - " The Ballad of Tom Dooley ", Sharyn McCrumb, p. 271 ~ Sharyn McCrumb

'The Ballad of Black Tom' was written, in part, during the latest round of arguments about H. P. Lovecraft's legacy as both a great writer and a prejudiced man. I grew up worshipping the guy, so this issue felt quite personal to me. ~ Victor LaValle

At four lines, with the quatrain, we reach the basic stanza form familiar from a whole range of English poetic practice. This is the length of the ballad stanza, the verse of a hymn, and innumerable other kinds of verse. ~ James Fenton

The subconscious leaves its fingerprints, but there's a stranger down there, too. A hell of a weird guy who knows a hell of a lot. (Ballad of the Flexible Bullet) ~ Stephen King

The progress of Sybilla though a market was the progress of worker bee through a bower of intently propagating blossoms. Everything stuck. From the toy stall she bought two ivory dolls, a hen whistle, a rattle and a charming set of miniature bells for a child's skirts: all were heroically received and borne by Tom, henceforth marked by a faint, distracted jingling. From the spice booth, set with delicious traps for the fat purse, she took cinnamon, figs, cumin seed and saffron, ginger, flower of gillyflower and crocus and - an afterthought - some brazil for dyeing her new wool. These were distributed between Christian and Tom. They listened to a balladmonger, paid him for all the verses of "When Tay's Bank," and bought a lengthy scroll containing a brand-new ballad which Tom Erskine read briefly and then discreetly lost. "No matter," said the Dowager cheerfully, when told. "Dangerous quantity, music. Because it spouts sweet venom in their ears and makes their minds all effeminate, you know. We can't have that." He was never very sure whether she was laughing at him, but rather thought not. They pursued their course purposefully, and the Dowager bought a new set of playing cards, some thread, a boxful of ox feet, a quantity of silver lace and a pair of scissors. She was dissuaded from buying a channel stone, which Tom, no curling enthusiast, refused utterly to carry, and got a toothpick in its case instead. They watched acrobats, invested sixpence for an unconvincing mermaid a ~ Dorothy Dunnett

When she had arranged her household affairs, she came to the library and bade me follow her. Then, with the mirror still swinging against her knees, she led me through the garden and the wilderness down to a misty wood. It being autumn, the trees were tinted gloriously in dusky bars of colouring. The rowan, with his amber leaves and scarlet berries, stood before the brown black-spotted sycamore; the silver beech flaunted his golden coins against my poverty; firs, green and fawn-hued, slumbered in hazy gossamer. No bird carolled, although the sun was hot. Marina noted the absence of sound, and without prelude of any kind began to sing from the ballad of the Witch Mother: about the nine enchanted knots, and the trouble-comb in the lady's knotted hair, and the master-kid that ran beneath her couch. Every drop of my blood froze in dread, for whilst she sang her face took on the majesty of one who traffics with infernal powers. As the shade of the trees fell over her, and we passed intermittently out of the light, I saw that her eyes glittered like rings of sapphires.

("The Basilisk") ~ R. Murray Gilchrist

First is a poem, a ballad, out of Scotland. You may say there is no king in it, and of course there isn't, which is what makes it so sad. The last line of the third verse, 'O he might hae been a king' is so sad that I don't like to look at it with both eyes at once. ~ William Mayne

I have been thinking about existence lately. In fact, I have been so full of admiration for existence that I have hardly been able to enjoy it properly ... I feel sometimes as if I were a child who opens its eyes on the world once and sees amazing things it will never know any names for and then has to close its eyes again. I know this is all mere apparition compared to what awaits us, but it is only lovelier for that. There is a human beauty in it. And I can't believe that, when we have all been changed and put on incorruptibility, we will forget our fantastic condition of mortality and impermanence, the great bright dream of procreating and perishing that meant the whole world to us. In eternity this world will be Troy, I believe, and all that has passed here will be the epic of the universe, the ballad they sing in the streets. Because I don't imagine any reality putting this one in the shade entirely, and I think piety forbids me to try. ~ Marilynne Robinson

I like "God Give Me the Strength" very much. It's not really a blues and to call it a ballad is absurd. I don't know, its mid-tempo. Mark (St. John) actually wrote it and I think its very telling of our lives in the 60s. Its just a good song, ya know ... ~ Dick Taylor

With the poetry of plain speaking, Shannon Hitchcock recreates the daily drama of a vanished world. ~ Richard Peck

In eternity this world will be like Troy, I believe, and all that has passed here will be the epic of the universe, the ballad they sing in the streets. ~ Marilynne Robinson

O no, O no, True Thomas," she says,
"That name does not belong to me;
I am but the queen of fair Elfland,
And I'm come here for to visit thee. ~ Anonymous, Thomas Rymer And The Queen Of Elfland

The way Leo figured it, he spent more time crashing than he did flying. If there were a rewards card for frequent crashers, he'd be, like, double platinum level. Leo couldn't fly. He had a couple of minutes at most before he'd hit the water and go ker-splat. He decided he didn't like that ending to the Epic Ballad of Leo. ~ Rick Riordan

And while thou
livest, dear Kate, take a fellow of plain and
uncoined constancy; for he perforce must do thee
right, because he hath not the gift to woo in other
places: for these fellows of infinite tongue, that
can rhyme themselves into ladies' favours, they do
always reason themselves out again. What! a
speaker is but a prater; a rhyme is but a ballad. A
good leg will fall; a straight back will stoop; a
black beard will turn white; a curled pate will grow
bald; a fair face will wither; a full eye will wax
hollow: but a good heart, Kate, is the sun and the
moon; or, rather, the sun, and not the moon; for it
shines bright and never changes, but keeps his
course truly. If thou would have such a one, take
me; and take me, take a soldier; take a soldier,
take a king. And what sayest thou then to my love?
speak, my fair, and fairly, I pray thee ~ William Shakespeare

I

On the calm black water where the stars are sleeping
White Ophelia floats like a great lily;
Floats very slowly, lying in her long veils...
- In the far-off woods you can hear them sound the mort.

For more than a thousand years sad Ophelia
Has passed, a white phantom, down the long black river.
For more than a thousand years her sweet madness
Has murmured its ballad to the evening breeze.

The wind kisses her breasts and unfolds in a wreath
Her great veils rising and falling with the waters;
The shivering willows weep on her shoulder,
The rushes lean over her wide, dreaming brow.

The ruffled water-lilies are sighing around her;
At times she rouses, in a slumbering alder,
Some nest from which escapes a small rustle of wings;
- A mysterious anthem falls from the golden stars.

II

O pale Ophelia! beautiful as snow!
Yes child, you died, carried off by a river!
- It was the winds descending from the great mountains of Norway
That spoke to you in low voices of better freedom.

It was a breath of wind, that, twisting your great hair,
Brought strange rumors to your dreaming mind;
It was your heart listening to the song of Nature
In the groans of the tree and the sighs of the nights;

It was the voice of mad seas, the great roar,
That shattered your child's heart, too human and too soft;
It was a hands ~ Arthur Rimbaud

Renée and I met at a bar called the Eastern Standard in Charlottesville, Virginia. I had just moved there to study English in grad school. Renée was a fiction writer in the MFA program. I was sitting with my poet friend Chris in a table in the back, when I fell under the spell of Renée's bourbon-baked voice. The bartender put on Big Star's Radio City. Renée was the only other person in the room who perked up. We started talking about how much we loved Big Star. It turned out we had the same favorite Big Star song – the acoustic ballad Thirteen. She'd never heard their third album, Sister Lovers. So naturally, I told her the same thing I'd told every other woman I'd ever fallen for: "I'll make you a tape! ~ Rob Sheffield

I have a passion for ballad ... They are the gypsy children of song, born under green hedgerows in the leafy lanes and bypaths of literature,
in the genial Summertime. ~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Like the Society for Creative Anachronism, The Ballad of the White Horse depicted "the Middle Ages as they should have been." Chesterton's ballad made a lasting impression on Robert E. Howard, who praised it in letters to his friend Clyde Smith. ~ Joseph Laycock

I'm interested in feedback and learning what people want. It's a tricky thing for me when I do a set list. You get bored doing the same songs. Let's say we do one ballad in two hours, and it's "Wild Horses." If you say, I'm tired of that, let's try something less well known, and then you're out there stumbling through this song you just relearned at sound check, and you realize people probably want "Wild Horses" instead of this (laughs). You do need to do some songs that aren't so well known. The question is how many? I'm open to people posting their requests. ~ Mick Jagger