Respectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of Quotations. 1989.
| NUMBER: | 2006 |
| AUTHOR: | Oliver Wendell Holmes (1841–1935) |
| QUOTATION: | Gentlemen, to the lady without whom I should never have survived for eighty, nor sixty, nor yet thirty years. Her smile has been my lyric, her understanding, the rhythm of the stanza. She has been the spring wherefrom I have drawn the power to write the words. She is the poem of my life. |
| ATTRIBUTION: | Attributed to Justice Not verified in works about him nor in Magnificent Yankee, the film about him. He expressed a similar sentiment in a letter to Sir Frederick Pollock, May 24, 1929: “For sixty years she made life poetry for me.”—Holmes-Pollock Letters, ed. Mark De Wolfe Howe, vol. 2, p. 243 (1941). |
| SUBJECTS: | Wives |