Robert Fitzgerald Quotes

The question is how to bring a work of imagination out of one language that was just as taken-for-granted by the persons who used it as our language is by ourselves. Nothing strange about it. ~ Robert Fitzgerald

Men's lives are short .
The hard man and his cruelties will be
Cursed behind his back and mocked in death.
But one whose heart and ways are kind - of him
strangers will bear report to the whole wide world,
and distant men will praise him.

- Penelope in Robert Fitzgerald trans. THE ODYSSEY (364) ~ Robert Fitzgerald

Is encouragement what the poet needs? Open question. Maybe he needs discouragement. In fact, quite a few of them need more discouragement, the most discouragement possible. ~ Robert Fitzgerald

Electronic brains may help us to use our heads but will not excuse us from that duty, and as to our hearts-cardiograms cannot diagnose what may be most ill about them, or confirm what may be best. The faithful woman and the versatile brave man, the wakeful intelligence open to inspiration or grace-these are still exemplary for our kind, as they always were and always will be. ~ Robert Fitzgerald

The heart of the matter seems to me to be the direct interaction between one's making a poem in English and a poem in the language that one understands and values. I don't see how you can do it otherwise. ~ Robert Fitzgerald

Now, the language that had grown up and formed itself on those principles is what one is dealing with, and the problem is to bring a work of art in that medium into another medium formed on different principles and heard and understood in a different way. ~ Robert Fitzgerald

I think that everyone who took part has always been grateful for it. ~ Robert Fitzgerald

The invention of Bob Dylan with his guitar belongs in its way to the same kind of tradition of something meant to be heard, as the songs of Homer. ~ Robert Fitzgerald

Yes, living voices in a living language, so it seemed to us. ~ Robert Fitzgerald

There must of course be a relationship between translating and making poems of your own, but what it is I just don't know. ~ Robert Fitzgerald

In fact, eloquence in English will inevitably make use of the Latin element in our vocabulary. ~ Robert Fitzgerald

Lighthearted boys and girls
were harvesting the grapes in woven baskets,
while on a resonant harp a boy among them
played a tune of longing, singing low
with delicate voice a summer dirge. The others,
breaking out in song for the joy of it,
kept time together as they skipped along. ~ Homer

Well, with the French language, which I understood and spoke, however imperfectly, and read in great quantities, at certain times, the matter I suppose was slightly different from either Latin or Greek. ~ Robert Fitzgerald

Of course the other and more serious way in which it all happens is that one finds in poems and language some quality one appropriates for oneself and wishes to reproduce. ~ Robert Fitzgerald

That helped me to keep in touch with myself and to keep in touch with this really quite extraordinary language and literature into which I had pushed a little way. ~ Robert Fitzgerald

There's nothing of so infinite vexation As man's own thoughts. John Webster, The White Devil ~ Robert Galbraith

The Afro-American militant is a 'militant' because he defends himself, his family, his home, and his dignity. He does not introduce violence into a racist social system - the violence is already there, and has always been there. It is precisely this unchallenged violence that allows a racist social system to perpetuate itself. When people say that they are opposed to Negroes 'resorting to violence' what they really mean is that they are opposed to Negroes defending themselves and challenging the exclusive monopoly of violence practiced by white racists. ~ Robert F. Williams

Characterization is integral to the theatrical experience. ~ Robert Ludlum

This has resulted in more and more people becoming inner-directed and having as their only goal, getting as much as they can get out of the system and putting as little into it as possible. ~ Robert Teeter

In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on. ~ Robert Frost

He hurried the phrase 'educated at Oxord,' or swallowed it, or choked on it, as though it had bothered him before. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

Yes, Norman, I suppose you're right. That's where I'd probably be. But I wouldn't be there alone." Norman slammed the door, locked it, and turned away. He wasn't quite sure, but as he ran up the cellar steps he thought he could still hear her chuckling gently in the dark. ~ Robert Bloch

Is your underwear purple, too? ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

Minimize your therbligs until it becomes automatic; this doubles your effective lifetime - and thereby gives time to enjoy butterflies and kittens and rainbows. ~ Robert A. Heinlein

A particularly fine head on a man usually means that he is stupid; particularly deep philosophers are usually shallow thinkers; in literature, talents not much above the average are usually regarded by their contemporaries as geniuses. ~ Robert Musil

Investing is simple. It's the financial industry that works hard to make it complex! ~ Robert Rolih

It is well that war is so terrible, or we should grow too fond of it. ~ Robert E.Lee

The Best Is Yet To Be ~ Robert Browning

We have discovered with our new information systems that we can make all the appropriate checks and ensure public safety is not dented in any way in a much shorter time frame. ~ Robert Carson

Of all the varieties of modern pollution, noise is the most insidious. ~ Robert Lacey

This question goes way beyond my own little episodes of transcending overcaffeination and melancholy. It applies, in principle, to all negative feelings: fears, anxieties, loathing, self-loathing, and more. Imagine if our negative feelings, or at least lots of them, turned out to be illusions, and we could dispel them by just contemplating them from a particular vantage point. ~ Robert Wright

Golf is a worrier's game, inward, concentrated, a matter of inches, invented by the same people who gave us Presbyterianism. ~ Robert Hass

She seemed suddenly a daughter of light alone. His entity dropped out of her plane and he longed only to touch her dress with almost the realization that Joseph must have had of Mary's eternal significance. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

Love is a human religion in which another person is believed in. - Robert Seidenberg ~ Dorothy Tennov

You do not truly own anything that you can't carry in both arms at a dead run ~ Robert A. Heinlein

Well, you put a gun to my head."
"No. I put a suggestion in your mind and a gun in your hands. ~ Jeremy Robert Johnson

I'm so aware of the fact that if I hadn't taken the chances that I've taken along the line, I probably wouldn't be getting the best out of my voice anymore, I might have messed it up in that awful, predictable place. ~ Robert Plant

If you can achieve puberty, you can achieve a past. ~ Robert Harling

Language thus becomes monumental because of the mutations of advertising. ~ Robert Smithson

[Elvis] Presley was definitely a great inspiration to every guy who ever had a hard-on in the whole of the Western world, I should think. He shook everybody well and true, and we just kept on shakin'. But he started it. ~ Robert Plant

The sun rose reluctantly, without warmth. ~ Robert Jordan

Like Robert Mapplethorpe, Helmut Newton, and so many others before me, sexual imagery has always been a part of my photography. ~ Terry Richardson

Congress is not an ATM. ~ Robert Byrd

One morning, very early, when the sun was up,I rose and found the shiny dew on every buttercup ~ Robert Louis Stevenson

I believed there were no Hypotheticals in the sense of consciously acting agents conscious entities. There was only the process. The needles of evolution, endlessly knitting. ~ Robert Charles Wilson

Well, you know what? The actor still gets up in the morning, if he's still got something to work with, you go out there and you do it. Never quit! ~ Robert Forster

How to evolve? Read my book Prometheus Rising, and do all the exercises in that. There are a lot of exercises. It will keep you busy for at least a year. And if at the end of that year you haven't evolved, write me a letter of complaint, and I'll try to write a better book. ~ Robert Anton Wilson

At our best and most fortunate we make pictures because of what stands before our camera, to honor what is greater and more interesting than we are. We never accomplish this perfectly, though in return we are given something perfect
a sense of inclusion. Our subject thus redefines us, and is part of the biography by which we want to be known. ~ Robert Adams