A.E. Housman

The troubles of our proud and angry dust are from eternity, and shall not fail. Bear them we can, and if we can we must. Shoulder the sky, my lad, and drink your ale.

Ale, man, ale's the stuff to drink for fellows whom it hurts to think.

I, a stranger and afraid in a world I never made.

Malt does more than Milton can to justify God's ways to man.

We for a certainty are not the first have sat in taverns while the tempest hurled their hopeful plans to emptiness, and cursed whatever brute and blackguard made the world.

That is the land of lost content, I see it shining plain, the happy highways where I went and cannot come again.

Here dead lie we because we did not choose to live and shame the land from which we sprung. Life, to be sure, is nothing much to lose; but young men think it is, and we were young.

In every American there is an air of incorrigible innocence, which seems to conceal a diabolical cunning.