Elizabeth Barrett Browning
66 quotes
Biography
"You were made perfectly to be loved - and surely I have loved you, in the idea of you, my whole life long."
"If thou must love me, let it be for naught except for love's sake only."
"How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.I love thee to the depth and breadth and heightMy soul can reach"
"You're something between a dream and a miracle."
"Earth's crammed with heaven...But only he who sees, takes off his shoes."
"No man can be called friendless who has God and the companionship of good books."
"I love you not only for what you are, but for what I am when I am with you"
"I love you not only for what you are, but for what I am when I am with you. I love you not only for what you have made of yourself, but for what you are making of me. I love you for the part of me that you bring out."
"God's gifts put men's best dreams to shame."
"Earth's crammed with heaven, And every common bush afire with God."
"By thunders of white silence."
"I tell you, hopeless grief is passionless."
"Thou large-brained woman and large-hearted man."
"O the little birds sang east, and the little birds sang west."
"And kings crept out again to feel the sun."
"God only, who made us rich, can make us poor."
"Because God's gifts put man's best dreams to shame."
"The devil’s most devilish when respectable."
"Feminist literary critics have shown how in the 19th century women writers began to acknowledge women as their muses and their role models...Elizabeth Barrett Browning admired the work of George Sand and Mme. de Staël, while her work, in its turn, was an inspiration to Emily Dickinson...all of the American nineteenth-century woman's rights leaders considered Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh an inspiration. The list could be indefinitely extended to show the almost desperate search of writing women for authoritative female predecessors."
"You can find powerful anger in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s poems on slavery and child labor. In her anti-slavery poem "A Curse for a Nation," she has an angel explaining that "A curse from the lips of womanhood / Is very salt, and bitter, and good." Barrett Browning was roundly condemned in her own time for writing about politics."
"The beautiful seems right by force of beauty and the feeble wrong because of weakness."
"God's gifts put man's best dreams to shame."
"Smiles, tears, of all my life! - and, if God choose, I shall but love thee better after death."
"For tis not in mere death that men die most."
"The Greeks said grandly in their tragic phrase, 'Let no one be called happy till his death' to which I would add, 'Let no one, till his death, be called unhappy.'"