Edwin Arlington Robinson Quotes

Do you hear the children singing?

Where's the need of singing now?

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

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

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.

Alone, he saw the slanting waves roll in,
Each to its impotent annihilation
In a long wash of foam, until the sound
Become for him a warning and a torture,
Like a malign reproof reiterating
In vain its cold and only sound of doom.

I mean you last as long as lies.

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

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?

Out of a grave I come to tell you this, -
Out of grave I come to quench the kiss
That flames upon your forehead with a glow
That blinds you to the way that you must go.
Yes, there is yet one way to where she is, -
Bitter, but one that faith can never miss.
Out of a grave I come to tell you this -
To tell you this.

Dark hills at evening in the west,
Where sunset hovers like a sound
Of golden horns that sang to rest
Old bones of warriors underground,
Far now from all the bannered ways
Where flash the legions of the sun,
You fade--as if the last of days
Were fading, and all wars were done.

He knows much of what men paint themselves would blister in the light of what they are.

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.

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

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

I shall have more to say when I am dead.

She fears him, and will always ask
What fated her to choose him;
She meets in his engaging mask
All reasons to refuse him;
But what she meets and what she fears
Are less than are the downward years
Drawn slowly to the foamless weirs
Of age, were she to lose him.

Life is the game that must be played

GO to the western gate, Luke Havergal, -
There where the vines cling crimson on the wall, -
And in the twilight wait for what will come.
The wind will moan, the leaves will whisper some, -
Whisper of her, and strike you as they fall;
But go, and if you trust her she will call.
Go to the western gate, Luke Havergal -
Luke Havergal.

No, there is not a dawn in eastern skies
To rift the fiery night that 's in your eyes;
But there, where western glooms are gathering,
The dark will end the dark, if anything:
God slays Himself with every leaf that flies,
And hell is more than half of paradise.
No, there is not a dawn in eastern skies -
In eastern skies.

Out of a grave I come to tell you this, -
Out of grave I come to quench the kiss
That flames upon your forehead with a glow
That blinds you to the way that you must go.
Yes, there is yet one way to where she is, -
Bitter, but one that faith can never miss.
Out of a grave I come to tell you this -
To tell you this.

There is the western gate, Luke Havergal,
There are the crimson leaves upon the wall.
Go, - for the winds are tearing them away, -
Nor think to riddle the dead words they say,
Nor any more to feel them as they fall;
But go! and if you trust her she will call.
There is the western gate, Luke Havergal -
Luke Havergal.

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

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

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

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

The world is not a prison house, but a kind of spiritual kindergarten where millions of of bewildered infants are trying to spell God with the wrong blocks.

Who knows to-day from yesterday
May learn to count no thing too strange:
Love builds of what Time takes away,
Till Death itself is less than Change.

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

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.

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!