gay quotes

   For wheresoe'er I turn my ravished eyes, Gay gilded scenes and shining prospects rise, Poetic fields encompass me around, And still I seem to tread on classic ground.

-Joseph Addison
  A Letter from Italy.

It made Gay Rich and Rich Gay.

-Anonymous
c.1728  Alluding to the phenomenal success of  The Beggar's Opera, written by John Gay and produced by John Rich.

When you come to the end of a perfect day, And you sit alone with your thought, While the chimes ring out with a carol gay For the joy that the day has brought, Do you think what the end of a perfect day Can mean to a tired heart, When the sun goes down with a flaming ray, And the dear friends have to part?

- CarrieJacobs Bond
  'A Perfect Day'.

Mad about the boy, It's pretty funny but I'm mad about the boy. He has a gayappeal That makes me feel There may be something sad about the boy.

- Sir Noe«  l Peirce Coward
  'Mad  About the Boy' (song).

Coldly profane and impiously gay.

- George Crabbe
The Library (published1808), l.265.

WhenTime shall turn those amber locks to grey, My verse again shall gild and make them gay.

- Michael Drayton
  England's Heroic Epistles,'Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, to the Lady Geraldine'.

I assume everyone isgay, unless told otherwise.

- Harvey Forbes Fierstein
  In Life,  Jan.

Belinda smiled, and all the world was gay.

- Alexander Pope
  The Rape of the Lock, canto 2, l.52.

Here gay Description Aegypt glads with showers; Or gives to Zembla fruits, to Barca flowers; Glitt'ring with ice here hoary hills are seen, There painted vallies of eternal green.

- Alexander Pope
  The Dunciad, bk.1, l.71^4.

It will be a gay world. There will be lights everywhere except in the minds of men, and the fall of the last civilization will not be heard above the din.

- Sir Herbert Edward Read
  Quoted in Hoggart andJohnston, An Idea of Europe (1987), 'Pyramids and Planes'.

I wanted to be black. I always wanted to be black† Being black iswarm and gay, being white is cold and sad.

-Jean pseudonym of  Ellen Gwendolen Rees Williams Rhys
  Voyage in the Dark, ch.1.

He poured, to lord and lady gay, The unpremeditated lay.

- Sir Walter Scott
  The Lay of the Last Minstrel, introduction.

Lo, thro' her works gay nature grieves How brief she is and frail, As ever o'er the falling leaves Autumnal winds prevail. Yet still the philosophic mind Consolatory food can find, And hope her anchorage maintain: We never are deserted quite; 'Tis by succession of delight That love supports his reign.

- Christopher Smart
  Ode to the Earl of Northumberland, with Some Other Pieces, 'On a Bed of Guernsey Lilies: written in September1763', stanza 2.

  Yet is that glass so gay, that it can blind The wisest sight, to think gold that is brass.

- Edmund Spenser
  Of the mirror of fashion. The Faerie Queen, bk.6, proem, stanza 5.

The waves beside them danced; but they Out-did the sparkling waves in glee: A poet could not but be gay, In such a jocund company: I gazedand gazedbut little thought What wealth the show to me had brought.

-William Wordsworth
  'I wandered lonely as a cloud', stanza 3 (published1807).

Never to have lived is best, ancient writers say; Never to have drawn the breath of life, never to have looked into the eye of day; The second best's a gay goodnight and quickly turn away.

-W(illiam) B(utler) Yeats
  'From Oedipus at Colonnus', stanza 4. Collected in The Tower (1928).