No poem is worth anything unless it starts from a poetic trance, out of which you can be wakened by interruption as from a dream. In fact, it is the same thing.
ROBERT GRAVESThe decline of true taste for food is the beginning of a decline in a national culture as a whole. When people have lost their authentic personal taste, they lose their personality and become the instruments of other people’s wills.
More Robert Graves Quotes
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Love is a universal migraine. A bright stain on the vision, Blotting out reason.
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The gift of independence once granted cannot be lightly taken away again.
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Marriage, like money, is still with us; and, like money, progressively devalued.
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But give thanks, at least, that you still have Frost’s poems; and when you feel the need of solitude, retreat to the companionship of moon, water, hills and trees. Retreat, he reminds us, should not be confused with escape. And take these poems along for good luck!
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Truth-loving Persians do not dwell upon The trivial skirmish fought near Marathon.
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She told me that all the girls in Annezin prayed every night for the war to end and for the English to go away as soon as their money was spent. She said that the clause about the money was always repeated in case God should miss it.
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Fact is not truth, but a poet who wilfully defies fact cannot achieve truth.
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Any honest housewife would sort them out,/ Having a nose for fish, an eye for apples.
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The poet’s first rule must be never to bore his readers; and his best way of keeping this rule is never to bore himself-which, of course, means to write only when he has something urgent to say.
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There’s a cool web of language winds us in, Retreat from too much joy or too much fear: We grow sea-green at last and coldly die In brininess and volubility.
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I don’t really feel my poems are mine at all. I didn’t create them out of nothing. I owe them to my relations with other people.
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Prose books are the show dogs I breed and sell to support my cat.
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There is no such thing as good writing, only good rewriting.
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The remarkable thing about Shakespeare is that he really is very good, in spite of all the people who say he is very good.
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New beginnings and new shoots Spring again from hidden roots Pull or stab or cut or burn, Love must ever yet return.
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