Eugène Delacroix, “Hamlet and Horatio in the Graveyard” (1839), oil on canvas, 29,5 x 36 cm, Musée du Louvre, Paris (image via Web Gallery of Art)
Three debates down and two weeks still to go.
Alas my love you do me wrong,
To cast me of discourteously;
And I have loved you so long,
Delighting in your company.—Anonymous, “Greensleeves”
Mathematics has given economics rigor, but alas, also mortis.
—Robert Heilbroner
Alas, I am dying beyond my means.
—Oscar Wilde, as he sipped champagne on his deathbed
Hugo — alas!
—André Gide, when asked who was the greatest 19th-century poet
In the present age, alas! our pens are ravished by unlettered authors and unmannered critics, that make a havoc rather than a building, a wilderness rather than a garden.
—Aubrey Beardsley
At Dirty Dick’s and Sloppy Joe’s
We drank our liquor straight,
Some went upstairs with Margery,
And some, alas, with Kate.—W. H. Auden, “The Sea and the Mirror”
Oh literature, oh the glorious Art, how it preys upon the marrow in our bones. It scoops the stuffing out of us, and chucks us aside. Alas!
—D. H. Lawrence
Poetry surrounds us everywhere, but putting it on paper is, alas, not so easy as looking at it.
—Vincent van Gogh
Pigeons on the grass alas.
—Gertrude Stein, Four Saints in Three Acts
I’ve studied now Philosophy and Jurisprudence, Medicine — and even, alas! Theology — from end to end with labor keen; and here, poor fool with all my lore I stand, no wiser than before.
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Alas! All music jars when the soul’s out of tune.
—Miguel de Cervantes
Railway termini. They are our gates to the glorious and the unknown. Through them we pass out into adventure and sunshine, to them, alas! we return.
—E. M. Forster, Howards End
Alas, human vices, however horrible one might imagine them to be, contain the proof (were it only in their infinite expansion) of man’s longing for the infinite; but it is a longing that often takes the wrong route. It is my belief that the reason behind all culpable excesses lies in this depravation of the sense of the infinite.
—Charles Baudelaire
Idealism, alas, does not protect one from ignorance, dogmatism, and foolishness.
—Sidney Hook
The flesh is sad, Alas! and I have read all the books.
—Stéphane Mallarmé, “Brise Marine”
Drink, and dance and laugh and lie, love the reeling midnight through, for tomorrow we shall die! (But, alas, we never do.)
—Dorothy Parker
