eunuch quotes

   The fine pleasure is not to do a thing but to feel that you could† If I could but get on, if I could but produce a work I should not mind its being buried, silenced, and going no further; but it kills me to be time's eunuch and never to beget.

-Gerard Manley Hopkins
  Letter to Robert Bridges,1 Sep. Collected in C C  Abbott (ed)  The Correspondence of Gerard Manley Hopkins and Robert Bridges (1935).

Birds buildbut not I build; no, but strain, Time's eunuch, and not breed one work that wakes. Mine,O thou lord of life, send my roots rain.

-Gerard Manley Hopkins
  'Thou art indeed just, Lord'.

But from the first 'twas Peter's drift To be a kind of moral eunuch, He touched the hem of Nature's shift, Felt faintand never dared uplift The closest, all-concealing tunic.

- Percy Bysshe Shelley
  'Peter Bell theThird', pt.4, stanza11.

The House of Lords, an illusion to which I have never been able to subscriberesponsibility without power, the prerogative of the eunuch throughout the ages. See Baldwin 54:46.

- SirTom originally Tom Straussler Stoppard
 Lord Malquist and Mr Moon, pt.6.