pre-meditation

Updated: May 23, 2025

You are, when all is done, not even detestable, not even a worthy peg whereon to hang denunciatory sonnets, you shallow-pated pretty creatures whom poets oh, and in youth all men are poets! whom poets, now and always, are doomed to hanker after to the detriment of their poesy. No, I concede it: you kill without pre-meditation, and without ever suspecting your hands to be anything but stainless.

James Branch Cabell - The Line of Love: Dizain des Mariages