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.
ROBERT GRAVESI 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.
More Robert Graves Quotes
-
-
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 GRAVES -
I was thinking, “So, I’m Emperor, am I? What nonsense! But at least I’ll be able to make people read my books now.
ROBERT GRAVES -
I believe that every English poet should read the English classics, master the rules of grammar before he attempts to bend or break them, travel abroad, experience the horrors of sordid passion, and – if he is lucky enough – know the love of an honest woman.
ROBERT GRAVES -
Any honest housewife would sort them out,/ Having a nose for fish, an eye for apples.
ROBERT GRAVES -
The remarkable thing about Shakespeare is that he really is very good, in spite of all the people who say he is very good.
ROBERT GRAVES -
This seems to me a philosophical question, and therefore irrelevant, question. A poet’s destiny is to love.
ROBERT GRAVES -
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 GRAVES -
I made no more protests. What was the use of struggling against fate.
ROBERT GRAVES -
Before an attack, the platoon pools all its available cash and the survivors divide it up afterwards. Those who are killed can’t complain, the wounded would have given far more than that to escape as they have, and the unwounded regard the money as a consolation prize for still being here.
ROBERT GRAVES -
There’s no money in poetry, but then there’s no poetry in money, either.
ROBERT GRAVES -
Lovers to-day and for all time Preserve the meaning of my rhyme: Love is not kindly nor yet grim But does to you as you to him.
ROBERT GRAVES -
I 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.
ROBERT GRAVES -
There is no such thing as good writing, only good rewriting.
ROBERT GRAVES -
In love as in sport, the amateur status must be strictly maintained.
ROBERT GRAVES -
Though philosophers like to define poetry as irrational fancy, for us it is practical, humorous, reasonable way of being ourselves.
ROBERT GRAVES -
The remarkable thing about Shakespeare is that he really is very good, in spite of all the people who say he is very good.
ROBERT GRAVES -
Marriage, like money, is still with us; and, like money, progressively devalued.
ROBERT GRAVES -
Marriage, like money, is still with us; and, like money, progressively devalued.
ROBERT GRAVES -
Nine-tenths of English poetic literature is the result either of vulgar careerism or of a poet trying to keep his hand in. Most poets are dead by their late twenties.
ROBERT GRAVES -
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.
ROBERT GRAVES -
Faults in English prose derive not so much from lack of knowledge, intelligence or art as from lack of thought, patience or goodwill.
ROBERT GRAVES -
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.
ROBERT GRAVES -
Poet, never chase the dream. Laugh yourself and turn away. Mask your hunger, let it seem Small matter if he come or stay; But when he nestles in your hand at last, Close up your fingers tight and hold him fast.
ROBERT GRAVES -
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.
ROBERT GRAVES -
Take your delight in momentariness, Walk between dark and dark a shining space With the grave ‘s narrowness, though not its peace.
ROBERT GRAVES -
The sap of Spring in the young wood a-stir Will celebrate with green the Mother, And every song-bird shout awhile for her; But we are gifted, even in November Rawest of seasons, with so huge a sense Of Her nakedly worn magnificence We forget cruelty and past betrayal, Heedless of where the next bright bolt may fall.
ROBERT GRAVES