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.
ROBERT GRAVESWhen a dream is born in you With a sudden clamorous pain, When you know the dream is true And lovely, with no flaw nor stain, O then, be careful, or with sudden clutch You’ll hurt the delicate thing you prize so much.
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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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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Kill if you must, but never hate: Man is but grass and hate is blight, The sun will scorch you soon or late, Die wholesome then, since you must fight
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He found a formula for drawing comic rabbits: This formula for drawing comic rabbits paid. Till in the end he could not change the tragic habits This formula for drawing comic rabbits made.
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The function of poetry is religious invocation of the muse; its use is the experience of mixed exaltation and horror that her presence excites.
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About this business of being a gentleman: I paid so heavily for the fourteen years of my gentleman’s education that I feel entitled, now and then, to get some sort of return.
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To be a poet is a condition rather than a profession.
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Hardly one soldier in a hundred was inspired by religious feeling of even the crudest kind. It would have been difficult to remain religious in the trenches even if one had survived the irreligion of the training battalion at home.
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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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Kaisers and Czars will strut the stage Once more with pomp and greed and rage; Courtly ministers will stop At home and fight to the last drop; By the million men will die In some new horrible agony.
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The gift of independence once granted cannot be lightly taken away again.
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Every fairy child may keep Two strong ponies and ten sheep; All have houses, each his own, Built of brick or granite stone; They live on cherries, they run wild I’d love to be a Fairy’s child.
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Children born of fairy stock Never need for shirt or frock, Never want for food or fire, Always get their heart’s desire.
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Well, we’ve been lucky devils both And there is no need for a pledge or oath To bind our lovely friendship fast, By firmer stuff Close bound enough.
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Poetry is no more a narcotic than a stimulant; it is a universal bittersweet mixture for all possible household emergencies and its action varies accordingly as it is taken in a wineglass or a tablespoon, inhaled, gargled or rubbed on the chest by hard fingers covered with rings.
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Patriotism, in the trenches, was too remote a sentiment, and at once rejected as fit only for civilians, or prisoners. A new arrival who talked patriotism would soon be told to cut it out.
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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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About this business of being a gentleman: I paid so heavily for the fourteen years of my gentleman’s education that I feel entitled, now and then, to get some sort of return.
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Anthropologists are a connecting link between poets and scientists; though their field-work among primitive peoples has often made them forget the language of science.
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Love without hope, as when the young bird-catcher Swept off his tall hat to the Squire’s own daughter, So let the imprisoned larks escape and fly Singing about her head, as she rode by.
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The butterfly, a cabbage-white, (His honest idiocy of flight) Will never now, it is too late, Master the art of flying straight.
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No honest theologian therefore can deny that his acceptance of Jesus as Christ logically binds every Christian to a belief in reincarnation – in Elias case (who was later John the Baptist) at least.
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Never use the word ‘audience.’ The very idea of a public, unless the poet is writing for money, seems wrong to me. Poets don’t have an ‘audience’. They’re talking to a single person all the time.
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For I now realize that what overcame me that evening was a sudden awareness of the power of intuition, the supra-logic that cuts out all routine processes of thought and leaps straight from problem to answer.
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Prose books are the show dogs I breed and sell to support my cat.
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In love as in sport, the amateur status must be strictly maintained.
ROBERT GRAVES