guest quotes

   Earth receive an honoured guest; WilliamYeats is laid to rest: Let the Irish vessel lie Emptied of its poetry.

-W(ystan) H(ugh) Auden
  'In Memory of  W.B.Yeats', pt.3.

Even so we in like manner, as soon as we were born, began to draw to our end, and had no sign of virtue to shew; but were consumed in our own wickedness. For the hope of the ungodly is like dust that is blown away with the wind; like a thin froth that is driven away with the storm; like as the smoke which is dispersed here and there with a tempest, and passeth away as the remembrance of a guest that tarrieth but a day.

-Bible (Apocrypha)
Wisdom of Solomon 5:13^14.

I think the dying prayat the last not please but thank you as a guest thanks his host at the door.

- Annie Dillard
  Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, ch.15.

I Tiresias, old man with wrinkled dugs Perceived the scene, and foretold the rest I too awaited the expected guest. He, the young man carbuncular, arrives, A small house agent's clerk, with one bold stare, One of the low on whom assurance sits As a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire.

-T(homas) S(tearns) Eliot
  The Waste Land, pt.3,'The Fire Sermon'.

A guest of one's time and not a member of the household.

- George Frost Kennan
Of the feeling of being viewed as a pragmatist. Quoted in Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas The Wise Men (1986).

Welcome the coming, speed the parting guest.

- Alexander Pope
  Odyssey, bk.15, l.83.