Robert Fagles Odyssey Quotes

The armies massing ... crowding thick-and-fast
as the swarms of flies seething over the shepherds' stalls
in the first spring days when the buckets flood with milk-
so many long-haired Achaeans swarmed across the plain
to confront the Trojans, fired to smash their lines ~ Fagles Robert

I attended Amherst College from 1951 to 1955. The first two years were a revelation. There were innumerable exchanges with brilliant classmates, among them the playwright Ralph Allen, the classics scholar Robert Fagles, and the composer Michael Sahl. ~ Edmund Phelps

You are the king no doubt, but in one respect,
at least, I am your equal: the right to reply.
I claim that privilege too.
I am not your slave. I serve Apollo.
I don't need Creon to speak for me in public.

So,
you mock my blindness? Let me tell you this.
You with your precious eyes,
you're blind to the corruption in your life,
to the house you live in, those you live with-
who are your parents? Do you know? All unknowing
you are the scourge of your own flesh and blood,
the dead below the earth and the living here above,
and the double lash of your mother and your father's curse
will whip you from this land one day, their footfall
treading you down in terror, darkness shrouding
your eyes that now can see the light!

Soon, soon,
you'll scream aloud - what haven won't reverberate?
What rock of Cithaeron won't scream back in echo?
That day you learn the truth about your marriage,
the wedding-march that sang you into your halls,
the lusty voyage home to the fatal harbor!
And a crowd of other horrors you'd never dream
will level you with yourself and all your children.

There. Now smear us with insults - Creon, myself
and every word I've said. No man will ever
be rooted from the earth as brutally as you. ~ Robert Fagles

Now with the squadrons marshaled, captains leading each,
the Trojans came with cries and the din of war like wildfowl
when the long hoarse cries of cranes sweep on against the sky
and the great formations flee from winter's grim ungodly storms,
flying in force. shrieking south to the Ocean gulfs, speeding
blood and death to the Pygmy warriors, laonching at daybreak
savage battle down upon their heads. But Achaea's armies
came on strong in silence, breathing combat-fury,
hearts ablaze to defend each other to the death. ~ Fagles Robert

For every SF reader of that period, Robert A. Heinlein was also a touchstone. ~ Walter Jon Williams

They had us surrounded, and they were about to kill us when M-Squad showed up and saved our bacon, our sausage, and every other fine pork product we possess. ~ Robert J. Crane

Stories are like islands, go out exploring and you're bound to get lost fantastically. ~ M. Robert Randolph

I did a film when I was about 30; it's a coming of age story called 'Gas Food Lodging,' and I'm so proud of that little independent film. I play this young English geologist, and he's such a simple, loving kind of guy. Doesn't talk too much. He's just a quiet guy, and he gets the girl. ~ Robert Knepper

There is a logical explanation for everything, often mistaken for the reason it happened. ~ Robert Breault

You don't allow yourself the arrogance of self respect. ~ Robert Mamrak

The purpose of life is to fall in love, and never get caught. ~ Robert Black

She'd thrown something at the mirror, and then the mirror broke into a thousand pieces and she knew that wasn't all; she was breaking into a thousand pieces, too. ~ Robert Bloch

While by definition, starship engine rooms should have been predictable, uneventful places that operated according to the reliable mathematics of warp physics, she'd come to believe that, more often than not, they were in fact the nexi of entropy. Order battled chaos in these places with an almost dependable regularity. And engineers, she secretly suspected, functioned as avatars of both these forces, keeping them carefully balanced so that neither overwhelmed the other. Thus, warp drive worked, but the best engineers could still find a new wrinkle in the laws of physics when circumstances required it. Bhatnagar ~ Robert Simpson

The world's an incessant transformation, and to meditate
is awareness, with no
clinging to,
no working on, the mind.
It is a floating; ever-moving; 'marvellous emptiness'.
Only absorption in such a practice will release us
from the accidents, and appetites,
of life.
And upon this leaf one shall cross over
the stormy sea,
among the dragon-like waves. ~ Robert Gray

Every night I fold myself into her, every night she comes into my life and I feel her hand on my heart and she is saying, I am here ... I am here. ~ Robert Olmstead

The thing is," I said, "that to be what I am, I need to feel the way I do about you. No matter how you feel about me."

"I feel good about you," she said. "I do love you, you know."

"Yeah. But even if you didn't. The way I feel about you is my problem, not yours. And it's absolute. It can't be compromised. It could exist without you."

"Dead or alive," Susan said. In her face was that quality of serious amusement that so often invested her. ~ Robert B. Parker

My problem painting from my life was I found that you can't paint dirt without romanticising it. ~ Robert Gober

Man, Books & Booze is cool, right?. That's the most fun I've had in an interview this year. Definitely the most singing I've done. ~ Jeremy Robert Johnson

Come walk the path that leads to eternal happiness, joy, and everlasting life in the kingdom of our Heavenly Father. ~ Robert D. Hales

A 17-year-old girl in Australia hacked into my e-mail while I was on it, Then a 15-year-old girl in England did the same thing. ~ Robert Pattinson

Even their contemporaries felt that the relationship of Elizabeth and Robert transcended the details on practicality. There had to be some explanation for their lifelong fidelity, and those contemporaries put it down to 'synaptia', a hidden conspiracy of the stars, whose power to rule human lives no-one doubted: 'a sympathy of spirits between them, occasioned perhaps by some secret constellation', in the words of the historian William Camden, writing at the beginning of the seventeenth century. Theirs was a relationship already rooted in history and mythology. And that moment when Elizabeth heard she had come to the throne encapsulated much about their story. If our well-loved picture of Elizabeth's accession is something of a fantasy - if the reality is on the whole more interesting - you might say the same about our traditional picture of her relationship with Robert Dudley. ~ Sarah Gristwood

No God can put a man in hell in another world, who has made a little heaven in this. God cannot make a man miserable if that man has made somebody else happy. ~ Robert Green Ingersoll

Robert Jordan knew that now his papers were being examined by the man who could not read. ~ Ernest Hemingway,

Forget the past, let the dead bury the dead. Things were working out fine, and that was the only thing he had to remember. ~ Robert Bloch

Keep expenses low, reduce liabilities, and diligently build a base of solid assets. ~ Robert T. Kiyosaki

Though no one notices at the time, in-loveness obliterates the humanity of the beloved. One does a curious kind of insult to another by falling in love with him, for we are really looking at our own projection of God, not at the other person. If two people are in love, they tread on star dust for a time and live happily ever after - that is so long as this experience of divinity has obliterated time for them. Only when they come down to earth do they have to look at each other realistically and only then does the possibility of mature love exist. If one person is in love and the other not, the cooler one is likely to say, "We would have something better between us if you would look at me rather than at your image of me. ~ Robert A. Johnson

How uninteresting interesting things can become. ~ Robert Walser

My wife likes to say there are two kinds of people, those chasing pleasure and those running from pain. Maybe she's right, I don't know. What I do know is this: Pleasure helps you forget. But pain, pain forces you to hope. You tell yourself this can't last. Today could be different. Today something just might change. ~ Robert Cormier

I did Bored To Death with Jason [Schwartzman] and Zach Galifianakis and those guys. I mean, how lucky can you be that you get to be the old guy? I get to be Robert Preston to them now. That's what I feel. My job is to pass on what Preston and other people gave to me, which was show up, take the work seriously, don't take yourself seriously, and have a good time and be of service. Be there to support. ~ Richard Masur

The great prophetic work of the modern world is Goethe's Faust, so little appreciated among the Anglo-Saxons. Mephistopheles offers Faust unlimited knowledge and unlimited power in exchange for his soul. Modern man has accepted that bargain ...
I believe in what the Germans term Ehrfurcht: reverence for things one cannot understand. Faust's error was an aspiration to understand, and therefore master, things which, by God or by nature, are set beyond the human compass. He could only achieve this at the cost of making the achievement pointless. Once again, it is exactly what modern man has done. ~ Robert Aickman

That first concept is alway the most naturally and best. The mind errs, the emotion never. ~ Robert Schumann

I started out to be a sex fiend, but I couldn't pass the physical. ~ Robert Mitchum

Losers are people who are afraid of losing. ~ Robert Kiyosaki

The problem that first demands solution is to discover the disruptive agent which would be potent enough to rip the Cloghvorra Stone from its parent bed, to bear it down the valley for miles, and to cast it on the mountain side. ~ Robert Stawell Ball

One is more desirable when loved, not feared. ~ Robert M. Hensel

I love my dad and respect him and miss him, but I never hung around my father that much because my dad was a lawyer and engineer, and he really didn't understand what I was about. I was supposed to go to law school at UCLA - I was admitted - and instead of going to law school, I went on the road with a band. ~ Robert David Hall

That we were slaves I had known all my life
and nothing could be done about it. True, we weren't bought and sold
but as long as Authority held monopoly over what we had to have and what we could sell to buy it, we were slaves. ~ Robert A. Heinlein

You will learn to make better decisions in life with experience and time. ~ Robert Tew

When people meet my wife they think better of me. They say: "With a wife like that, he can't be as bad as we thought". ~ Robert Menzies

Commerce is the great civilizer. ~ Robert Green Ingersoll

I cannot believe in an eternity of hell. I hope God will forgive me if I err; but in this matter I cannot say, "Lord help my unbelief." ~ Robert Southey

I'd like to write a big rock anthem again.
I just need to listen to Korn, and then
I might get the idea of how to do it. ~ Robert Plant

She walked a ways down the concourse, and looked back and waved and then turned a corner and was out of sight. I still stood for a moment, looking at the last place I had seen her, being careful not to be routine, while I became the other guy again, the one I was without her. ~ Robert B. Parker

Strike, meanwhile, had seen just enough of Robin to be shocked by her appearance. He had never seen her face so pale, nor her eyes so puffy and bloodshot. Even as he sat down at his desk, eager to hear what information on Whittaker Shanker had brought to his office, the thought crossed his mind: What's the bastard done to her? And for a fraction of a second, before fixing all his attention on Shanker, Strike imagined punching Matthew and enjoying it. ~ Robert Galbraith

It takes all sorts of in and outdoor schooling To get adapted to my kind of fooling. ~ Robert Frost

The fact was that belief in them had to be there before they themselves could be there; if one did not look at the world with the world's eyes, the world already in one's own gaze, it fell apart into meaningless details that live as sadly far apart from each other as the stars in the night-sky. ~ Robert Musil

One of the most moral acts is to create a space in which life can move forward. ~ Robert M. Pirsig

Re: Robert Montgomery's Poems His writing bears the same relation to poetry which a Turkey carpet bears to a picture. There are colours in the Turkey carpet out of which a picture might be made. There are words in Mr. Montgomery's writing which, when disposed in certain orders and combinations,have made, and will make again, good poetry. But, as they now stand, they seem to be put together on principle in such a manner as to give no image of anything in the heavens above, or in the earth beneath, or in the waters under the earth. ~ Thomas B. Macaulay