Edwin Arlington Robinson Quotes

Are we no greater than the noise we make Along one blind atomic pilgrimage Whereon by crass chance billeted we go Because our brains and bones and cartilage Will have it so?

Life is the game that must be played.

Two kinds of gratitude: The sudden kind we feel for what we take; the larger kind we feel for what we give.

The world is a kind of spiritual kindergarten where millions of bewildered infants are trying to spell "God" with the wrong blocks.

No matter what we are, and what we sing, Time finds a withered leaf in every laurel

I shall have more to say when I am dead.

For when a woman is left too much alone, sooner or later she begins to think; and no man knows what then she may discover.

Your Dollar is your only Word, / The wrath of it your only fear. / You build it altars tall enough / To make you see, but your are blind; / You cannot leave it long enough / To look before you or behind.

And thus we all are nighing The truth we fear to know: Death will end our crying For friends that come and go.

Love must have wings to fly away from love, And to fly back again.

Shake the tree of life itself and bring down fruits unheard of.

I cannot find my way: there is no star In all the shrouded heavens anywhere

Poets and kings are but the clerks of Time, Tiering the same dull webs of discontent, Clipping the same sad alnage of the years.

Ah, when shall come love's courage to be strong! Tell me, O Lord--tell me, O Lord, how long Are we to keep Christ writhing on the cross!

Language that tells us, through a more or less emotional reaction, something that can not be said.

Pity is like a knife, sometimes, and it may pierce one who employs it more shrewdly than the victim it would save.

Were it not for love, Poor life would be a ship not worth launching.

I am living on hope and faith ... a pretty good diet when the mind will receive them.

I don't say what God is, but a name That somehow answers us when we are driven To feel and think how little we have to do With what we are.

seizing the swift logic of a woman, Curse God and die.

Friends: people who borrow my books and set wet glasses on them.

I have been reading the Old Testament, a most bloodthirsty and perilous book for the young. Jehovah is beyond doubt the worst character in fiction.

Do you hear the children singing?

This morning I deleted the hyphen from "hell-bound" and made it one word; this afternoon I redivided it and restored the hyphen.

To some will come a time when change itself is beauty, if not heaven.

The stillness of October gold Went out like beauty from a face.

Youth sees too far to see how near it is To seeing farther.

I mean you last as long as lies.

And we who delve in beauty's lore Know all that we have known before Of what inexorable cause Makes Time so vicious in his reaping.

The typical entrepreneur is no longer the bold and tireless man of Marshall, or the sly and rapacious Moneybags of Marx, but a mass of inert shareholders, indistinguishable from rentiers, who employ salaried managers to run their concerns.

Where's the need of singing now?

For through it all--above, beyond it all-- I know the far-sent message of the years, I feel the coming glory of the Light.

It is impossible to understand the economic system in which we are living if we try to interpret it as a rational scheme.It has to be understood as an awkward phase in a continuing process of historical development.

I wonder more and more just where I may have come out if I had never seen Harvard Square.