Joyce Kilmer: Poems, Essays and Letters in Two Volumes. Volume 2, Prose Works

“Happiness was but the occasional episode in a general drama of pain.””

— Joyce Kilmer

“I won't be a slave to the past. I'll love where I choose.””

— Joyce Kilmer

“Some folks want their luck buttered.””

— Joyce Kilmer

“Her experience had been of a kind to teach her, rightly or wrongly, that the doubtful honor of a brief transit through a sorry world hardly called for effusiveness, even when the path was suddenly irradiated at some half-way point by daybeams rich as hers. But her strong sense that neither she nor any human being deserved less than was given, did not blind her to the fact that there were others receiving less who had deserved much more. And in being forced to class herself among the fortunate she did not cease to wonder at the persistence of the unforeseen, when the one to whom such unbroken tranquility had been accorded in the adult stage was she whose youth had seemed to teach that happiness was but the occasional episode in a general drama of pain.””

— Joyce Kilmer

“She had learned the lesson of renunciation and was as familiar with the wreck of each day's wishes as with the diurnal setting of the sun.””

— Joyce Kilmer

“She had the hard, half-apathetic expression of one who deems anything possible at the hands of time and chance, except perhaps fair play””

— Joyce Kilmer

“Life is an oasis which is submerged in the swirling waves of sorrows and agonies.””

— Joyce Kilmer

“She had been too early habituated to anxious reasoning to drop the habit suddenly.””

— Joyce Kilmer

“It was part of his nature to extenuate nothing and live on as one of his own worst accusers.””

— Joyce Kilmer