Robert Hass Quotes

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Quotes About Robert Hass

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Sometimes it is good and sometimes
it is dangerous like the ignorance
of particulars, but our words are clear
and our movements give off light. ~ Robert Hass
Robert Hass quotes by Robert Hass
All the new thinking is about loss. In this it resembles all the old thinking ~ Robert Hass
Robert Hass quotes by Robert Hass
The market doesn't make communities. Markets make networks of self-interested individuals, and they work as long as there's more than enough to go around. ~ Robert Hass
Robert Hass quotes by Robert Hass
We asked the captain what course
of action he proposed to take toward
a beast so large, terrifying, and
unpredictable. He hesitated to
answer, and then said judiciously:
"I think I shall praise it." ~ Robert Hass
Robert Hass quotes by Robert Hass
When I was in high school in the '50s you were supposed to be an Elvis Presley, a James Dean, a Marlon Brando or a Kingston Trio type in a button-down shirt headed for the fraternities at Stanford or Cal. ~ Robert Hass
Robert Hass quotes by Robert Hass
The love of books
is for children
who glimpse in them
a life to come, but
I have come
to that life and
feel uneasy
with the love of books.
This is my life,
time islanded
in poems of dwindled time. ~ Robert Hass
Robert Hass quotes by Robert Hass
I got interested in the question of literacy because writers are always moaning about why more people don't read books. ~ Robert Hass
Robert Hass quotes by Robert Hass
'Paradise Lost' was printed in an edition of no more than 1,500 copies and transformed the English language. Took a while. Wordsworth had new ideas about nature: Thoreau read Wordsworth, Muir read Thoreau, Teddy Roosevelt read Muir, and we got a lot of national parks. Took a century. What poetry gives us is an archive, the fullest existent archive of what human beings have thought and felt by the kind of artists who loved language in a way that allowed them to labor over how you make a music of words to render experience exactly and fully. ~ Robert Hass
Robert Hass quotes by Robert Hass
Ah, love, this is fear. This is fear and syllables
and the beginnings of beauty. ~ Robert Hass
Robert Hass quotes by Robert Hass
After a while I understood that, talking this way, everything dissolves: justice, pine, hair, woman, you and I. There was a woman I made love to and I remembered how, holding her small shoulders in my hands sometimes, I felt a violent wonder at her presence like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river with its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat, muddy places where we caught the little orange-silver fish called pumpkinseed. It hardly had to do with her. Longing, we say, because desire is full of endless distances. ~ Robert Hass
Robert Hass quotes by Robert Hass
It's hell writing and it's hell not writing. The only tolerable state is having just written. ~ Robert Hass
Robert Hass quotes by Robert Hass
Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings, saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry. ~ Robert Hass
Robert Hass quotes by Robert Hass
The Vietnam War and the Iraq war, in different ways, both made me feel like I could not not address them. I'm very doubtful about the usefulness of poetry to do that. ~ Robert Hass
Robert Hass quotes by Robert Hass
Take the time to write. You can do your life's work in half an hour a day. ~ Robert Hass
Robert Hass quotes by Robert Hass
Imagination runs through the places where we live like water. We need both things-a living knowledge of the land and a live imagination of it and our place in it- if we are going to preserve it. ~ Robert Hass
Robert Hass quotes by Robert Hass
The whole difference between the nineteenth century and the twentieth century could be summed up in two words, graveyard and cemetery. ~ Robert Hass
Robert Hass quotes by Robert Hass
I would say Gary Snyder, who is from my part of the world as a poet and environmental thinker, will be read just as Henry Thoreau as John Muir will continue to be read. ~ Robert Hass
Robert Hass quotes by Robert Hass
The first fact of the world is that it repeats itself. I had been taught to believe that the freshness of children lay in their capacity for wonder at the vividness and strangeness of the particular, but what is fresh in them is that they still experience the power of repetition, from which our first sense of the power of mastery comes. Though predictable is an ugly little world in daily life, in our first experience of it we are clued to the hope of a shapeliness in things. To see that power working on adults, you have to catch them out: the look of foolish happiness on the faces of people who have just sat down to dinner is their knowledge that dinner will be served. Probably, that is the psychological basis for the power and the necessity of artistic form...Maybe our first experience of form is the experience of our own formation...And I am not thinking mainly of poems about form; I'm thinking of the form of a poem, the shape of its understanding. The presence of that shaping constitutes the presence of poetry. ~ Robert Hass
Robert Hass quotes by Robert Hass
Golf is a worrier's game, inward, concentrated, a matter of inches, invented by the same people who gave us Presbyterianism. ~ Robert Hass
Robert Hass quotes by Robert Hass
The Earth forgives the previous year every year. ~ Robert Hass
Robert Hass quotes by Robert Hass
I teach a lecture course on American poetry to as many as 150 students. For a lot of them, it's their only elective, so this is their one shot. They'll take the Russian Novel or American Poetry, so I want to give them the high points, the inescapable poets. ~ Robert Hass
Robert Hass quotes by Robert Hass
When it is bad…
I go into the night
and the night eats me ~ Robert Hass
Robert Hass quotes by Robert Hass
The first book that really knocked me out was the 'Brothers Karamazov.' I read it when I was a senior in high school. ~ Robert Hass
Robert Hass quotes by Robert Hass
A Faint Music by Robert Hass

Maybe you need to write a poem about grace.

When everything broken is broken,
and everything dead is dead,
and the hero has looked into the mirror with complete contempt,
and the heroine has studied her face and its defects
remorselessly, and the pain they thought might,
as a token of their earnestness, release them from themselves
has lost its novelty and not released them,
and they have begun to think, kindly and distantly,
watching the others go about their days -
likes and dislikes, reasons, habits, fears -
that self-love is the one weedy stalk
of every human blossoming, and understood,
therefore, why they had been, all their lives,
in such a fury to defend it, and that no one -
except some almost inconceivable saint in his pool
of poverty and silence - can escape this violent, automatic
life's companion ever, maybe then, ordinary light,
faint music under things, a hovering like grace appears.

As in the story a friend told once about the time
he tried to kill himself. His girl had left him.
Bees in the heart, then scorpions, maggots, and then ash.
He climbed onto the jumping girder of the bridge,
the bay side, a blue, lucid afternoon.
And in the salt air he thought about the word "seafood,"
that there was something faintly ridiculous about it.
No one said "landfood." He thought it was degra ~ Robert Hass
Robert Hass quotes by Robert Hass
In California in the early Spring, There are pale yellow mornings, when the mist burns slowly into day, The air stings like Autumn, clarifies like pain - Well, I have dreamed this coast myself. ~ Robert Hass
Robert Hass quotes by Robert Hass
When you are composing a verse, let there not be a hair's breadth separating your mind from what you write. Quickly say what is in your mind; never hesitate a moment. ~ Robert Hass
Robert Hass quotes by Robert Hass
August is dust here. Drought
stuns the road,
but juice gathers in the berries. ~ Robert Hass
Robert Hass quotes by Robert Hass
When I was in college, I lost my scholarship one year. I had enough money for tuition, but not room and board. So I camped in the hills. ~ Robert Hass
Robert Hass quotes by Robert Hass
I think that the job of poetry, its political job, is to refresh the idea of justice, which is going dead in us all the time. ~ Robert Hass
Robert Hass quotes by Robert Hass
As poet laureate, I was asked to be a spokesman for literature. ~ Robert Hass
Robert Hass quotes by Robert Hass
The basis of art is change in the universe. ~ Robert Hass
Robert Hass quotes by Robert Hass
Not to make too much of a claim for poetry, but this is a question that goes to the moral heart of the business of any art: 'How do you see the world, and what right do you have to see the world in the way that you do?' ~ Robert Hass
Robert Hass quotes by Robert Hass
What would you do if you were me? she said.
If I were you-you, or if I were you-me?
If you were me-me.
If I were you-you, he said, I'd do exactly
what you're doing. ~ Robert Hass
Robert Hass quotes by Robert Hass
Don't imitate me;
it's as boring
as the two halves of a melon. ~ Robert Hass
Robert Hass quotes by Robert Hass
When everything broken is broken,
and everything dead is dead,
and the hero has looked into the mirror with complete contempt,
and the heroine has studied her face and its defects
remorselessly, and the pain they thought might,
as a token of their earnestness, release them from themselves
has lost its novelty and not released them,
and they have begun to think, kindly and distantly,
watching the others go about their days
likes and dislikes, reasons, habits, fears
that self-love is the one weedy stalk
of every human blossoming, and understood,
therefore, why they had been, all their lives,
in such a fury to defend it, and that no one
except some almost inconceivable saint in his pool
of poverty and silence - can escape this violent, automatic
life's companion ever, maybe then, ordinary light,
faint music under things, a hovering like grace appears. ~ Robert Hass
Robert Hass quotes by Robert Hass
Writing is an incessant process of discovery. ~ Robert Hass
Robert Hass quotes by Robert Hass
Don't worry, spiders,
I keep house
casually. ~ Robert Hass
Robert Hass quotes by Robert Hass
No southerner had been elected President for more than a century, and it was a bitter article of faith among southern politicians that no southerner would be elected President in any foreseeable future; when members of the House of Representatives gave their Speaker, Sam Rayburn, ruler of the House for more than two decades, a limousine as a present, attached to the back of the front seat was a plaque that read 'To Our Beloved Sam Rayburn - Who Would Have Been President If He Had Come From Any Place but the South. ~ Robert A. Caro
Robert Hass quotes by Robert A. Caro
Science differs from politics or religion, in precisely this one discipline: we agree in advance to simply reject our own findings when they have been shown to be in error. ~ Robert Pollack
Robert Hass quotes by Robert Pollack
Women will forgive anything. Otherwise, the race would have died out long ago. ~ Robert A. Heinlein
Robert Hass quotes by Robert A. Heinlein
If service is the rent you pay for your existence on this earth, are you behind in your rent? ~ Robert G. Allen
Robert Hass quotes by Robert G. Allen
Colt makes a heavy firearm." - Virgil Cole ~ Robert B. Parker
Robert Hass quotes by Robert B. Parker
You have freedom when you're easy in your harness. ~ Robert Frost
Robert Hass quotes by Robert Frost
…the subject is so important, and with 
such vast implications for society… The damage that psychopaths do to the global economy, and human civilization in general, is incalculable. ~ Robert D. Hare
Robert Hass quotes by Robert D. Hare
There are six canons of conservative thought:

1) Belief in a transcendent order, or body of natural law, which rules society as well as conscience. Political problems, at bottom, are religious and moral problems. A narrow rationality, what Coleridge called the Understanding, cannot of itself satisfy human needs. "Every Tory is a realist," says Keith Feiling: "he knows that there are great forces in heaven and earth that man's philosophy cannot plumb or fathom." True politics is the art of apprehending and applying the Justice which ought to prevail in a community of souls.

2) Affection for the proliferating variety and mystery of human existence, as opposed to the narrowing uniformity, egalitarianism, and utilitarian aims of most radical systems; conservatives resist what Robert Graves calls "Logicalism" in society. This prejudice has been called "the conservatism of enjoyment"--a sense that life is worth living, according to Walter Bagehot "the proper source of an animated Conservatism."

3) Conviction that civilized society requires orders and classes, as against the notion of a "classless society." With reason, conservatives have been called "the party of order." If natural distinctions are effaced among men, oligarchs fill the vacuum. Ultimate equality in the judgment of God, and equality before courts of law, are recognized by conservatives; but equality of condition, they think, means equality in servitude and boredom.

4) P ~ Russell Kirk
Robert Hass quotes by Russell Kirk
What is required is sight and insight- then you might add one more: excite. ~ Robert Frost
Robert Hass quotes by Robert Frost
Once a person knows a kiss and a kind word, you can't blame him for never wanting to live without them again. ~ Robert James Waller
Robert Hass quotes by Robert James Waller
I was no fool; I was aware that when another man is too anxious to force money on one, it is time to examine the cards, for there is almost certainly something illegal, or dangerous, or both, involved in the matter. ~ Robert A. Heinlein
Robert Hass quotes by Robert A. Heinlein
Man is not the source of all things, as the subjective idealists would say. Nor is he the passive observer of all things, as the objective idealists would say. The Quality which creates the world emerges as a relationship between man and his experience. He is a participant in the creation of all things. The measure of all things ... ~ Robert M. Pirsig
Robert Hass quotes by Robert M. Pirsig
When your own mind tells you to quit, you must ignore your negative thoughts and press on. ~ Robert Kiyosaki
Robert Hass quotes by Robert Kiyosaki
Proverbs 15:1 A gentle answer turns away anger, but a harsh word stirs up wrath. ~ Robert J. Morgan
Robert Hass quotes by Robert J. Morgan
If I am just as stupid when I am twenty as I was when I was two, if I am just as stupid when I am a hundred as I was when I was fifty, then I am not doing my job. I am occupying space and time to no purpose, and I might just as well have been a lump of rock. ~ Robert Silverberg
Robert Hass quotes by Robert Silverberg
Ultimately, Communism must be defeated by progressive political programs which wipe out the poverty, misery, and discontent on which it thrives. ~ Robert Kennedy
Robert Hass quotes by Robert Kennedy
Free will is a golden thread running through the frozen matrix of fixed events. ~ Robert A. Heinlein
Robert Hass quotes by Robert A. Heinlein
I think the goal is to make a well written scene seem like it's improvised and/or to come up with things that you find in the room that you couldn't have known until you get into the real situation, just try to improve things as you go along. ~ Robert Downey, Jr.
Robert Hass quotes by Robert Downey, Jr.
What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence or lawlessness; but love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or they be black. ~ Robert Kennedy
Robert Hass quotes by Robert Kennedy
I'll work with a director if I think I'm going to get into a comfortable situation, and if it's someone I respect and who respects me, even if they're not so well known. Movies are hard to make, and you have to work toward a common ethic and do your best. ~ Robert De Niro
Robert Hass quotes by Robert De Niro
All right,' said Pooley, 'as panic is clearly ill-received hereabouts, what do we do? ~ Robert Rankin
Robert Hass quotes by Robert Rankin
The key to life is to be happy with or without money. Money only magnifies who you really are. ~ Robert Kiyosaki
Robert Hass quotes by Robert Kiyosaki
Liberation, I guess, is everybody getting what they think they want, without knowing the whole truth. Or in other words, liberation finally amounts to being free from things we don't like in order to be enslaved by things we approve of. Here's to the eternal tandem. ~ Robert Fulghum
Robert Hass quotes by Robert Fulghum
By no means was crazy unique to the South,but it sure did love to parade it around on the front porch, give it a drink and welcome the world to stare. ~ Robert Reeves
Robert Hass quotes by Robert Reeves
I'm not going out of my way looking for devils; but I wouldn't step out of my path to let one go by. ~ Robert E. Howard
Robert Hass quotes by Robert E. Howard
To the turtle, the concept of "loneliness" is incomprehensible. She always has been alone, and any other social state is unthinkable. ~ Robert H. Baker
Robert Hass quotes by Robert H. Baker
Will Smith is young, he's cool and my kids have his CDs. ~ Robert Conrad
Robert Hass quotes by Robert Conrad
The emblem of equal rights. It means free hands, free lips, self- government, and the sovereignty of the individual. ~ Robert Green Ingersoll
Robert Hass quotes by Robert Green Ingersoll
You can say whatever you want; it doesn't matter. It doesn't faze me. I'll still go out and do what I have to do, whether that's making A's in the classroom or doing well on the field. ~ Robert Griffin III
Robert Hass quotes by Robert Griffin III
Blood on the kitchen floor. Called ~ Robert Pobi
Robert Hass quotes by Robert Pobi
If Jehovah cannot support his religion without going into partnership with a State Legislature, I think he ought to give it up. ~ Robert Green Ingersoll
Robert Hass quotes by Robert Green Ingersoll
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