Compelling Couplets

SeanTheFirst

Only The Lonely
The best two-liners you can remember. Don't be obvious! Here's a couple to get you going;

She was left behind, and sour
and she wrote to me, equally dour

Do you see me when we pass?
I half-die

My love is as sharp as a needle in your eye
You must be such a fool to pass me by
 
Can I break the lyrical couplet rule already? My favourite line of his, ever, from Autobiography:

'Well, I think it's all over now, anyway,' says Gill Smith, expertly folding me away like a winter bedspread.

Closely contested by:
'Do you know Nicholas Parsons?' asks Joan [Sims, legendary Carry On actress], possibly tipsy. 'He is a c**t,' she says, and that's that.
 
Off the top of my head:

"I'm starved of mirth
Let's go and trip a dwarf."


Also
"With my hands on my head
I'll flop on your bed"

...and any other couplet from Maladjusted.
 
All of Maladjusted. Particularly the delivery on 25Live.

Personal faves (not sure these are couplets, as such) are:

You stalk the house
In a low-cut blouse :
"Oh Christ, another stifled
Friday night!"

and,

When the gulf between
All the things I need
And the things I receive
Is an ancient ocean wide, wild, lost, uncrossed

Another less obvious one would be Friday Mourning:

This dawn raid soon put paid to
All the things I'd whispered to you
At night time

Adore the imagery of a "dawn raid...".
 
use a weapon of words
or fight with your fists.
 
So, I broke into the palace
With a sponge and a rusty spanner

Under slate grey Victorian sky,
Here you'll find despair and I

Amid concrete and clay, and general decay
Nature must still find a way

They said "There's too much caffeine in your bloodstream
And a lack of real spice in your life"

The last night on Maudlin Street
Goodbye house, goodbye stairs

Dab-hands at trouble
With four days of stubble, we are
 
Time will mold you and craft you

but soon when You’re looking away it will slide up and shaft you


What those in power do to you reminds us at a glance

How humans hate each others guts and show it given a chance
 
She said: "I've hammered a smile
Across this pasty face of mine

Also:

She said: "I've hung on, I have edged
Along this narrow ledge

(Since the day I was born in 1975.")
 
Oh Mother, I can feel the soil falling over my head
And as I climb into an empty bed, oh well. Enough said.
 
"Ready with ready-wit
Still running 'round
On the flesh rampage
-At your age!"
 
Ceiling shadows shimmy by
And when the wardrobe towers like a beast of prey
There's sadness in your beautiful eyes

(Must confess, I don't know/care if these are 'couplets', but they're just beautiful lyrics...I could have added more from THTRTC but that might have broken the rules).
 
When I'm lying in my bed, I think about life and I think about death..... and neither one particularly appeals to me.
 
Ceiling shadows shimmy by
And when the wardrobe towers like a beast of prey
There's sadness in your beautiful eyes

(Must confess, I don't know/care if these are 'couplets', but they're just beautiful lyrics...I could have added more from THTRTC but that might have broken the rules).

Yeah, "couplet" seems very restrictive.

"I was delayed, I was way-laid
An emergency stop
I smelt the last ten seconds of life
I crashed down on the crossbar
And the pain was enough to make
A shy, bald buddhist reflect
And plan a mass-murder"
 
A small girl runs crying through the park
so freely her daddy berates her.
Right now, so for the rest of her life,
she is convinced that her daddy hates her.

and

For whether you stay, or you stray,
an in-built guilt catches up with you.
And as it comes around to your place, at 5 am,
it wakes you up and it laughs in your face.


Just brilliant.
 
To bend the rules even further...

One of my favourite things written by him...

"The years pass as quickly as the sentence that describes their speed, yet you cannot believe it until you very suddenly look behind you and see a space once relied upon as being the future."
 
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