Robert Lowell Quotes

If youth is a defect, it is one we outgrow too soon.

In the end, there is no end.

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.

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

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

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

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

History has to live with what was here, clutching and close to fumbling all we had - it is so dull and gruesome how we die, unlike writing, life never finishes.

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

I was overcome with an attack of pathological enthusiasm.

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

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.

I myself am hell; nobody's here

It's the light of the oncoming train.

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

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.

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

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.

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

In the end, every hypochondriac is his own prophet.

What can the dove of Jesus give You now but wisdom, exile? Stand and live, The dove has brought an olive branch to eat.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

The Lord survives the rainbow of His will.

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

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.

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

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

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

the scythers, Time and Death, Helmed locusts, move upon the tree of breath

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.

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