parish quotes

   You were silly like us: your gift survived it all; 40 The parish of rich women, physical decay, Yourself; mad Ireland hurt you into poetry. Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still, For poetry makes nothing happen.

-W(ystan) H(ugh) Auden
  'In Memory of  W.B.Yeats', pt.2.

It ought to be quite as natural and straightforward a matter for a labourer to take his pension from his parish, because he has deserved well of his parish, as for a man in higher rank to take his pension from his country, because he has deserved well of his country.

-John Ruskin
  Unto this Last, preface.

[To] have an unmannerly fat clerk ask the consent of every butcher in the parish to join John Absolute and Lydia Languish, spinster.Oh that I should live to hear myself called spinster!

- Richard Brinsley Sheridan
  Lydia Languish, who had hoped for a romantic elopement. The Rivals, act 5, sc.1.

I look upon all the world as my parish.

-John Wesley
  Journal entry,11 Jun.