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 GRAVESI revise the manuscript till I can’t read it any longer, then I get somebody to type it. Then I revise the typing. Then it’s retyped again. Then there’s a third typing, which is the final one. Nothing should then remain that offends the eye.
More Robert Graves Quotes
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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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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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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.
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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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I was last in Rome in AD 540 when it was full of Goths and their heavy horses. It has changed a great deal since then.
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The award of a pure gold medal for poetry would flatter the recipient unduly: no poem ever attains such carat purity.
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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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Marriage, like money, is still with us; and, like money, progressively devalued.
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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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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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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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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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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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Since the age of 15 poetry has been my ruling passion and I have never intentionally undertaken any task or formed any relationship that seemed inconsistent with poetic principles; which has sometimes won me the reputation of an eccentric.
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What we now call “finance” is, I hold, an intellectual perversion of what began as warm human love.
ROBERT GRAVES