Lowell Quotes

Life is the jailer, death the angel sent to draw the unwilling bolts and set us free. ~ James Russell Lowell

In the scale of the destinies, brawn will never weigh so mach as brain. ~ James Russell Lowell

Witch-heart, are you gold or black? ~ Amy Lowell

O visionary world, condition strange, Where naught abiding is but only change. ~ James Russell Lowell

A Tragic Honesty, like the Ian Hamilton biography of Lowell that I read recently, is a sad and occasionally terrifying account of how creativity can be simultaneously fragile and self-destructive; it also made me grateful that I am writing now, when the antidepressants are better, and we all drink less. Stories about contemporary writers being taken away in straitjackets are thin on the ground - or no one tells them to me, anyway - but it seemed to happen to Lowell and Yates all the time; there are ten separate page references under 'breakdowns' in the index of A Tragic Honesty. ~ Nick Hornby

Irrigation, unscientifically conducted, would not give us such truly wonderful mathematical fitness [as we observe in the Martian canals] ... A mind of no mean order would seem to have presided over the system we see-a mind certainly of considerably more comprehensiveness than that which presides over the various department of our own public works. ~ Percival Lowell

I was overcome with an attack of pathological enthusiasm. ~ Robert Lowell

I myself am hell;
nobody's here ~ Robert Lowell

My father used to say that all protagonists were versions of the author who wrote them - even if it meant the author had to acknowledge a side of himself that he did not know existed. It just required courage. ~ Catherine Lowell

precisely because she was ~ Elizabeth Lowell

Salem"

In salem seasick spindrift drifts or skips
to the canvas flapping on the seaward panes
until the knitting sailor stabs at ships
nosing like sheep of Morpheus through his brain's
asylum. Seaman, seaman, how the draft
lashes the oily slick about your head,
beating up whitecaps! Seaman, Charon's raft
dumps its damned goods into the harbor-bed,--
There sewage sickens the rebellious seas.
Remember, seaman, Salem fisherman
Once hung their nimble fleets on the Great Banks.
Where was it that New England bred the men
who quartered the Leviathan's fat flanks
and fought the British Lion to his knees? ~ Robert Lowell

Humbleness is always grace; always dignity ~ James Russell Lowell

My father's nephew was the blues musician, Lowell Fulson. Every time he came around, he had a pretty car, a beautiful woman and a slick sharkskin suit. Believe it or not, that's how I decided I wanted to get into music. ~ Charlie Wilson

Ipecac syrup of happiness. There Lowell would be. With Harlow. ~ Karen Joy Fowler

Lowell's best friend was the heroically moustached art director of a tobacco magazine that published in the same building where Lowell worked at plumbing. His name was Harry Balmer, and despite the evidence of his moustache he was nervous, compulsive, and wracked with small fears. He looked his best from across a wide room; the closer you got to him, the more he seemed to fall apart into a mass of twitches and gnawed finernails and the clearer it became that this big, smart-looking moustache was a kind of bush he was trying to hide behind. ~ L.J. Davis

SPEAK OF TROUBLE highlights the abilities of Lowell Sostomi as singer/songwriter and brings together a talented band of musicians with amazing dexterity, loads of energy, and very original arrangements. Im impressed. ~ Gordon Lightfoot

The power of recognition is one of the strongest forces for stimulating human and social action. ~ Lowell Milken

The one thing finished in this hasty world. ~ James Russell Lowell

Praise follows truth afar off, and only overtakes her at the grave; plausibility clings to her skirts and holds her back till then ~ James Russell Lowell

When he's like this, Miss Lowell," Mark offered from his seat on the sofa, "I usually take it upon myself to stamp out in a rage."

"Must I stamp? Or can I sweet out gracefully?" "By all means, sweep. ~ Courtney Milan

Our parents met at the Lowell Observatory in Arizona at a high school summer science camp. "I'd come to see the heavens," our father always said. "But the stars were in her eyes," a line that used to please and embarrass me in equal measure. Young geeks in love. ~ Karen Joy Fowler

People evaporated in alcohol, the way people evaporated in dreams. ~ Catherine Lowell

Learn to love the sunrise and sunset, the beating of rain on the roof and windows, and the gentle fall of snow on a winter day. ~ Lowell L. Bennion

Carrefour"

O You,
Who came upon me once
Stretched under apple-trees just after bathing,
Why did you not strangle me before speaking
Rather than fill me with the wild white honey of your words
And then leave me to the mercy
Of the forest bees.

Originally published in Coterie: A Quarterly: Art, Prose, and Poetry No. 4. Edited by Lall Chaman (1920) ~ Amy Lowell

My heart is tuned to sorrow, and the strings Vibrate most readily to minor chords, Searching and sad; my mind is stuffed with words Which voice the passion and the ache of things: Illusions beating with their baffled wings Against the walls of circumstance. ~ Amy Lowell

What visionary tints the year puts on, When falling leaves falter through motionless air Or numbly cling and shiver to be gone! How shimmer the low flats and pastures bare, As with her nectar Hebe Autumn fills The bowl between me and those distant hills, And smiles and shakes abroad her misty, tremulous hair! ~ James Russell Lowell

Always trust yerself, lass. There's not a soul in this world that has a heart like yers. Plenty o' smart people here, aye, but logic ain't always the best way to a decision. Can ye remember that? -Alban Dewberry ~ E.S. Lowell

Incredulity robs us of many pleasures, and gives us nothing in return. ~ James Russell Lowell

Of my merit On that pint you yourself may jedge: All is, I never drink no sperit, Nor I haint never signed no pledge. ~ James Russell Lowell

One universe, one body ... in this urn
the animal night sweats of the spirit burn ~ Robert Lowell

Let us be of cheer, remembering that the misfortunes hardest to bear are those which never come. ~ Amy Lowell

I do know I can lie awake all night and it feels as if someone is cutting out my stomach the pain of having lost her is so awful. And I am angry that I was made to choose, that both Fen & Helen needed me to choose, to be their one & only when I didn't want a one & only. I loved that Amy Lowell poem when I first read it, how her lover was like red wine at the beginning and then became bread. But that has not happened to me. My loves remain wine to me, yet I become too quickly bread to them. It was unfair, the way I had to decide one way or another in Marseille. Perhaps I made the conventional choice, the easy way for my work, my reputation, and of course for a child. A child that does not come. ~ Lily King

The dandelions and buttercups gild all the lawn: the drowsy bee stumbles among the clover tops, and summer sweetens all to me. ~ James Russell Lowell

As subtle and universally pervasive as gravity, love touches everything, and enhances everything it touches. ~ Elizabeth Lowell

But better far it is to speak
One simple word, which now and then
Shall waken their free nature in the weak
And friendless sons of men. ~ James Russell Lowell

Not a softness anywhere about me,
Only whalebone and brocade. ~ Amy Lowell

Ah, men do not know how much strength is in poise, That he goes the farthest who goes far enough. ~ James Russell Lowell

I long ago abandoned the notion of a life without storms, or a world without dry and killing seasons. Life is too complicated, too constantly changing, to be anything but what it is. And I am, by nature, too mercurial to be anything but deeply wary of the grave unnaturalness involved in any attempt to exert too much control over essentially uncontrollable forces. There will always be propelling, disturbing elements, and they will be there until, as Lowell put it, the watch is taken from the wrist. ~ Kay Redfield Jamison

the Kamchatka Peninsula." "What do you say?" "We're betting if the man and the picture matched, neither was Kyle Donovan." Jake's eyes narrowed. "Bad news." "For Donovan, certainly. He probably got that chunk of Mother Russia they offered you. But bad for us? We don't know. ~ Elizabeth Lowell

All thoughtful men are solitary and original in themselves. ~ James Russell Lowell

How long can a man live on the outside before he loses his ability to love? How long before there's no more hope? ~ Elizabeth Lowell

Ef you want peace, the thing you've gut to du
Is jes' to show you're up to fightin', tu. ~ James Russell Lowell

Dearest I cannot loiter here
in lather like a polar bear. ~ Robert Lowell

Fools, when their roof-tree falls, think it doomsday. ~ James Russell Lowell

Great truths are portions of the soul of man; Great souls are portions of eternity. ~ James Russell Lowell

They talk about their Pilgrim blood, their birthright high and holy! a mountain-stream that ends in mud thinks is melancholy. ~ James Russell Lowell

All that you may achieve or discover you will regard as a fragment of a larger pattern of the truth which from the separate approaches every true scholar is striving to descry. ~ Abbott L. Lowell

Christ! What are patterns for? ~ Amy Lowell

She was the girl with her finger in the dike," she said. "Little did anyone know that when she removed it, all hell was going to break loose. ~ Lowell Cauffiel

Not what we give,
But what we share,
For the gift
without the giver
Is bare. ~ James Russell Lowell

When an alpha male calls his woman a slut or a whore, it's not because he thinks she's disgusting, or because he's degrading her. Quite the opposite. He's honoring her, by telling her, "You're everything I want, and you love me enough, you're willing to be my every fantasy and not hold back. You'll be vulnerable with me because I want all you have to give. You're willing to be seductive, alluring, and sleazy for me, because that's what I want from my sexy bitch." What else could a man want, except maybe for her to cook his next meal in nothing but her hooker heals. ~ Chanse Lowell

Heaven is neither here nor there to me. Everywhere and nowhere. Just not in between, But I believe in Heaven. ~ James Russell Lowell

Out of gas ... I haven't heard that one in a long time. ~ Carey Lowell

The Drunken Fisherman"

Wallowing in this bloody sty,
I cast for fish that pleased my eye
(Truly Jehovah's bow suspends
No pots of gold to weight its ends);
Only the blood-mouthed rainbow trout
Rose to my bait. They flopped about
My canvas creel until the moth
Corrupted its unstable cloth.

A calendar to tell the day;
A handkerchief to wave away
The gnats; a couch unstuffed with storm
Pouching a bottle in one arm;
A whiskey bottle full of worms;
And bedroom slacks: are these fit terms
To mete the worm whose molten rage
Boils in the belly of old age?

Once fishing was a rabbit's foot--
O wind blow cold, O wind blow hot,
Let suns stay in or suns step out:
Life danced a jig on the sperm-whale's spout--
The fisher's fluent and obscene
Catches kept his conscience clean.
Children, the raging memory drools
Over the glory of past pools.

Now the hot river, ebbing, hauls
Its bloody waters into holes;
A grain of sand inside my shoe
Mimics the moon that might undo
Man and Creation too; remorse,
Stinking, has puddled up its source;
Here tantrums thrash to a whale's rage.
This is the pot-hole of old age.

Is there no way to cast my hook
Out of this dynamited brook?
The Fisher's sons must cast about
When shallow waters peter out.
I will catch Christ with a greased worm,
And when ~ Robert Lowell

God does not weigh criminality in our scales. We have one absolute, with the seal of authority upon it; and with us an ounce is an ounce, and a pound a pound. God's measure is the heart of the offender,
a balance which varies with every one of us, a balance so delicate that a tear cast in the other side may make the weight of error kick the beam. ~ James Russell Lowell

Taste is the next gift to genius. ~ James Russell Lowell

Oh to break loose like the chinook
salmon jumping and falling back,
nosing up to the impossible
stone and bone-crushing waterfall ...
Time to grub up and junk the year's
output, a dead wood of dry verse:
dim confession, coy revelation,
liftings, listless self-imitation,
whole days when I could hardly speak,
came pluming home unshaven, weak
and willing to read anyone
things done before and better done ... ~ Robert Lowell

Isn't there some truth in all fiction?" "There's some fiction in all truth too. ~ Catherine Lowell

Fanaticism, or, to call it by its milder name, enthusiasm, is only powerful and active so long as it is aggressive. Establish it firmly in power, and it becomes conservatism, whether it will or no. ~ James Russell Lowell

James Russell Lowell wrote: It's not what we give but what we share, For the gift without the giver is bare. Who gives of himself of his alms feeds three, Himself, his hungering neighbor, and me. ~ John Wooden

Fortune is the rod of the weak, and the staff of the brave. ~ James Russell Lowell

Modeling was something that fell into my lap. It was fun to travel and make money, but it always seemed like a hobby. ~ Carey Lowell

New conditions of life will stimulate thought and give new forms to its expression. ~ James Russell Lowell

We've inherited many ideas about writing that emerged in the eighteenth century, especially an interest in literature as both an expression and an exploration of the self. This development - part of what distinguishes the "modern" from the "early modern" - has shaped the work of many of our most celebrated authors, whose personal experiences indelibly and visibly mark their writing. It's fair to say that the fiction and poetry of many of the finest writers of the past century or so - and I'm thinking here of Conrad, Proust, Lawrence, Joyce, Woolf, Kafka, Plath, Ellison, Lowell, Sexton, Roth, and Coetzee, to name but a few - have been deeply autobiographical. The link between the life and the work is one of the things we're curious about and look for when we pick up the latest book by a favorite author. ~ James Shapiro

Literature, properly so called, draws its sap from the deep soil of human nature's common and everlasting sympathies, the gathered leaf-mound of countless generations, and not from any top dressing capriciously scattered over the surface. ~ James Russell Lowell

Art is the desire of a man to express himself, to record the reactions of his personality to the world he lives in. ~ Amy Lowell

On the neck of the young man sparkles no gem so gracious as enterprise. Youth condemns; maturity condones. ~ Amy Lowell

Whenever you have the kind of market that is taking shape now - a wildly volatile one with big pricing discrepancies - it plays right into the hands of managers who are very focused on research and stock picking. ~ James Russell Lowell

There is no bore we dread being left alone with so much as our own minds. ~ James Russell Lowell

When I was a beggarly boy, And lived in a cellar damp, I had not a friend nor a toy, But I had Aladdin's lamp ... ~ James Russell Lowell

Under the influence of a political framework like our own. We ~ James Russell Lowell

So we're all right, an' I, for one, Don't think our cause'll lose in vally By rammin' Scriptur' in our gun, An' gittin' Natur' for an ally. ~ James Russell Lowell

Beyond Stone Ring Keep's high walls, the wind wailed of coming winter. Ariane didn't hear the mournful cry. She heard nothing but echoes ~ Elizabeth Lowell

We have chosen to write the biography of our disease because we love it platonically - as Amy Lowell loved Keats - and have sought its acquaintance wherever we could find it. And in this growing intimacy we have become increasingly impressed with the influence that this and other infectious diseases, which span - in their protoplasmic continuities - the entire history of mankind, have had upon the fates of men. ~ Hans Zinsser

I would hardly change the sorrowful words of the poets for their glad ones. Tears dampen the strings of the lyre, but they grow the tensor for it, and ring even the clearer and more ravishingly. ~ James Russell Lowell

A wise man travels to discover himself. ~ James Russell Lowell

It is not a great Xerxes army of words, but a compact Greek ten thousand that march safely down to posterity. ~ James Russell Lowell

While tenderness of feeling and susceptibility to generous emotions are accidents of temperament, goodness is an achievement of the will and a quality of the life. ~ James Russell Lowell

The future belongs to the educated. ~ Lowell Milken

It is right precious to behold
The first long surf of climbing light
Flood all the thirsty east with gold. ~ James Russell Lowell

The snow had begun in the gloaming, and busily all the night had been heaping field and highway with a silence deep and white. ~ James Russell Lowell

The soil out of which such men as he are made is good to be born on, good to live on, good to die for and to be buried in. ~ James Russell Lowell

He who esteems the Virginia reel A bait to draw saints from their spiritual weal, And regards the quadrille as a far greater knavery Than crushing His African children with slavery, Since all who take part in a waltz or cotillon Are mounted for hell on the devil's own pillion, Who, as every true orthodox Christian well knows, Approaches the heart through the door of the toes. ~ James Russell Lowell

Grief said C.S. Lewis is like "a winding valley where any bend may reveal a totally new landscape." This is so. The lessons that come from grief come from its unexpected moves, from its shifting views of what had gone before and what is yet to come. Pain brought so often into one's consciousness cannot maintain the same capacity to wound. Grief, however creates strange sensitivity. The world is too intense to tolerate: a veil, a drink, another anaesthetic is required to blot out the ache of what remains. One sees too much and feels it, as Robert Lowell put it, "with one skin-layer missing."
Grief conspires to ensure that it will in time wear itself out. Unlike depression, it acts to preserve the self. Depression is malignant, indiscriminately destructive. Grief may bear resemblance to depression, but it is a distant kinship. In Grief, death occasions the pain. In depression, death is the solution to the pain. In Grief, one feels the absence of a life, not life itself. In depression, it is otherwise one cannot access the beat of life! ~ Kay Redfield Jamison

I love her with a love as still As a broad river's peaceful might, Which by high tower and lowly mill, Goes wandering at its own will, And yet does ever flow aright. ~ James Russell Lowell

We couldn't get it off the ground as a film, but then we begin to think television, and Lowell pushed it out there and Jim and Nick were anxious to do Hap and Leonard anyway, and I had worked with them before, so it was a perfect story. I love the series. I hope there's a second. ~ Joe R. Lansdale

Truly there is a tide in the affairs of men; but there is no gulf-stream setting forever in one direction. ~ James Russell Lowell

The pale and quiet moon Makes her calm forehead bare, And the last fragments of the storm, Like shattered rigging from a fight at sea, Silent and few, are drifting over me. ~ James Russell Lowell

Here was a type of the true elder race, And one of Plutarch's men talked with us face to face. ~ James Russell Lowell

Reading Chaucer is like brushing through the dewy grass at sunrise. ~ James Russell Lowell

Reading enables us to see with the keenest eyes, to hear with the finest ears, and listen to the sweetest voices of all time. ~ James Russell Lowell

It ["The Ancient Mariner"] is marvellous in its mastery over that delightfully fortuitous inconsequence that is the adamantine logic of dreamland. ~ James Russell Lowell

When you are older, you will realize that the things you feel to be true don't require verbal confirmation. ~ Catherine Lowell

And unofficially? ~ Elizabeth Lowell

Lowell is my home. It is where I drew my first breath. It is where I will always derive a sense of place and a sense of belonging ~ Paul Tsongas

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

Piety is indifferent whether she enters at the eye or at the ear. There is none of the senses at which she does not knock one day or other. The Puritans forgot this, and thrust Beauty out of the meeting-house and slammed the door in her face. ~ James Russell Lowell

I hope only that you have been able to find a little gold in the ashes. ~ Lowell Blair

In science, read by preference the newest works. In literature, read the oldest. The classics are always modern. ~ Amy Lowell

A wise skepticism is the first attribute of a good critic. ~ James Russell Lowell