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.
ROBERT GRAVESTo be a poet is a condition rather than a profession.
More Robert Graves Quotes
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Hate is a fear, and fear is rot That cankers root and fruit alike, Fight cleanly then, hate not, fear not, Strike with no madness when you strike.
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A perfect poem is impossible. Once it had been written, the world would end. Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.
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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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There is one story and one story only.
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The 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.
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The gas-cylinders had by this time been put into position on the front line. A special order came round imposing severe penalties on anyone who used any word but “accessory” in speaking of the gas. This was to keep it secret, but the French civilians knew all about the scheme long before this.
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She tells her love while half asleep, In the dark hours, With half-words whispered low: As Earth stirs in her winter sleep And puts out grass and flowers Despite the snow, Despite the falling snow.
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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.
ROBERT GRAVES -
The gas-cylinders had by this time been put into position on the front line. A special order came round imposing severe penalties on anyone who used any word but “accessory” in speaking of the gas. This was to keep it secret, but the French civilians knew all about the scheme long before this.
ROBERT GRAVES -
Originally marriage meant the sale of a woman by one man to another; now most women sell themselves though they have no intention of delivering the goods listed in the bill of sale.
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One smile relieves a heart that grieves.
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We forget cruelty and past betrayal, Heedless of where the next bright bolt may fall.
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Marriage, like money, is still with us; and, like money, progressively devalued.
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But that so many scholars are barbarians does not much matter so long as a few of them are ready to help with their specialized knowledge the few independent thinkers, that is to say the poets, who try to to keep civilization alive.
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Fact is not truth, but a poet who wilfully defies fact cannot achieve truth.
ROBERT GRAVES