Best 35 quotes of Robert Lowell on MyQuotes

Robert Lowell

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    Robert Lowell

    And blue-lung'd combers lumbered to the kill.

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    Robert Lowell

    But sometimes everything I write with the threadbare art of my eye seems a snapshot

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    Robert Lowell

    Everywhere, giant finned cars nose forward like fish; a savage servility slides by on grease.

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    Robert Lowell

    I'm sure that writing isn't a craft, that is, something for which you learn the skills and go on turning out. It must come from some deep impulse, deep inspiration. That can't be taught, it can't be what you use in teaching.

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    Robert Lowell

    I saw the spiders marching through the air, Swimming from tree to tree that mildewed day In latter August when the hay Came creaking to the barn. But where The wind is westerly, Where gnarled November makes the spiders fly Into the apparitions of the sky, They purpose nothing but their ease and die Urgently beating east to sunrise and the sea.

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    Robert Lowell

    I saw the spiders marching through the air, Swimming from tree to tree that mildewed day In latter August when the hay Came creaking to the barn.

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    Robert Lowell

    It is night, And it is vanity, and age Blackens the heart of Adam. Fear, The yellow chirper, beaks its cage.

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    Robert Lowell

    It's a completely powerful and serious book, as good as anything in prose or poetry written by a 'beat' writer, and one of the most alive books written by any American for years. I don't see how it could be considered immoral.

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    Robert Lowell

    It's the light of the oncoming train.

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    Robert Lowell

    I want to apologize for plaguing you with so many telephone calls last November and December. When the 'enthusiasm' is coming on me it is accompanied by a feverish reaching out to my friends. After its over I wince and wither.

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    Robert Lowell

    I was overcome with an attack of pathological enthusiasm.

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    Robert Lowell

    I will catch Christ with a greased worm, And when the Prince of Darkness stalks My bloodstream to its Stygian term . . . On water the Man-Fisher walks.

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    Robert Lowell

    Life begins to happen. My hoppped up husband drops his home disputes, and hits the streets to cruise for prostitutes

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    Robert Lowell

    Middle Age At forty-five, What next, what next? At every corner, I meet my Father, My age, still alive.

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    Robert Lowell

    Most poetry is very formal, but when a modern poet is formal he gets more attention for it than old poets did.

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    Robert Lowell

    Once fishing was a rabbit's foot-- O wind blow cold, O wind blow hot

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    Robert Lowell

    Pity the planet, all joy gone from this sweet volcanic cone; peace to our children when they fall in small war on the heel of small war--until the end of time to police the earth, a ghost orbiting forever lost in our monotonous sublime

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    Robert Lowell

    Pity the planet, all joy gone from this sweet volcanic cone

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    Robert Lowell

    Poetry is not the record of an event: it is an event.

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    Robert Lowell

    September twenty-second, Sir, the bough cracks with unpicked apples, and at dawn the small-mouth bass breaks water, gorged with spawn.

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    Robert Lowell

    Sometimes nothing is so solid to me as writing - I suppose that's what a vocation means - at times a torment, a bad conscience, but all in all, purpose and direction.

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    Robert Lowell

    Talking about the past is like a cat's trying to explain climbing down a ladder.

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    Robert Lowell

    Their monument sticks like a fishbone in the city's throat.

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    Robert Lowell

    The world is absolutely out of control now and is not going to be saved by any reason or unreason.

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    Robert Lowell

    Those blessed structures, plot and rhyme-- why are they no help to me now I want to make something imagined, not recalled?

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    Robert Lowell

    Wallowing in this bloody sty, I cast for fish that pleased my eye

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    Robert Lowell

    We are all old-timers, each of us holds a locked razor.

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    Robert Lowell

    We feel the machine slipping from our hands As if someone else were steering; If we see light at the end of the tunnel, It's the light of the oncoming train.

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    Robert Lowell

    All autumn, the chafe and jar of nuclear war; we have talked our extinction to death. I swim like a minnow behind my studio window.

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    Robert Lowell

    Animals fattened for your for your arena suffered less than you in dying-yours the lawlessness of something simple that has lost its law, my namesake, and the last Caligula.

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    Robert Lowell

    EB: 'Ll showed me a long verse-letter, very obscene, he’d received from Dylan T[Thomas] before D’s last trip here [New York]—very clever, but it really can’t be published for a long, long time, he’s decided. About people D. met in the U.S. etc.—one small sample: A Streetcar Named Desire is referred to as 'A truck called F———.' RL: 'Psycho-therapy is rather amazing—something like stirring up the bottom of an aquarium—chunks of the past coming up at unfamiliar angles, distinct and then indistinct.' RL: 'I have just finished the Yeats Letters—900 & something pages—although some I’d read before. He is so Olympian always, so calm, so really unrevealing, and yet I was fascinated.' RL: 'Probably you forget, and anyway all that is mercifully changed and all has come right since you found Lota. But at the time everything, I guess (I don’t want to overdramatize) our relations seemed to have reached a new place. I assumed that would be just a matter of time before I proposed and I half believed that you would accept. Yet I wanted it all to have the right build-up. Well, I didn’t say anything then.' EB: 'so I suppose I am just a born worrier, and that when the personal worries of adolescence and the years after it have more or less disappeared I promptly have to start worrying about the decline of nations . . . But I really can’t bear much of American life these days—surely no country has ever been so filthy rich and so hideously uncomfortable at the same time.

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    Robert Lowell

    Mr. Edwards and the Spider" I saw the spiders marching through the air, Swimming from tree to tree that mildewed day In latter August when the hay Came creaking to the barn. But where The wind is westerly, Where gnarled November makes the spiders fly Into the apparitions of the sky, They purpose nothing but their ease and die Urgently beating east to sunrise and the sea; What are we in the hands of the great God? It was in vain you set up thorn and briar In battle array against the fire And treason crackling in your blood; For the wild thorns grow tame And will do nothing to oppose the flame; Your lacerations tell the losing game You play against a sickness past your cure. How will the hands be strong? How will the heart endure? A very little thing, a little worm, Or hourglass-blazoned spider, it is said, Can kill a tiger. Will the dead Hold up his mirror and affirm To the four winds the smell And flash of his authority? It’s well If God who holds you to the pit of hell, Much as one holds a spider, will destroy, Baffle and dissipate your soul. As a small boy On Windsor Marsh, I saw the spider die When thrown into the bowels of fierce fire: There’s no long struggle, no desire To get up on its feet and fly It stretches out its feet And dies. This is the sinner’s last retreat; Yes, and no strength exerted on the heat Then sinews the abolished will, when sick And full of burning, it will whistle on a brick. But who can plumb the sinking of that soul? Josiah Hawley, picture yourself cast Into a brick-kiln where the blast Fans your quick vitals to a coal— If measured by a glass, How long would it seem burning! Let there pass A minute, ten, ten trillion; but the blaze Is infinite, eternal: this is death, To die and know it. This is the Black Widow, death.

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    Robert Lowell

    That was the first growth, the heir of all my minutes, the victim of every ramification- more and more it grew green, and gave too much shelter. And now at my homecoming, the barked elms stand up like sticks along the street. I am a foot taller than when I left, and cannot see the dirt at my feet. Yet sometimes I catch my vague mind circling with a glazed eye for a name without a face, or a face without a name, and at every step, I startle them. They start up, dog-eared, bald as baby birds.

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    Robert Lowell

    The light at the end of the tunnel is just the light of an oncoming train.

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    Robert Lowell

    What we love we are.