If I were a girl, I’d despair. The supply of good women far exceeds that of the men who deserve them.
ROBERT GRAVESI 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.
More Robert Graves Quotes
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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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I made no more protests. What was the use of struggling against fate
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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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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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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.
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The gift of independence once granted cannot be lightly taken away again.
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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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This seems to me a philosophical question, and therefore irrelevant, question. A poet’s destiny is to love.
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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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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.
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When I’m killed, don’t think of me Buried there in Cambrin Wood, Nor as in Zion think of me With the Intolerable Good. And there’s one thing that I know well, I’m damned if I’ll be damned to Hell!
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Any honest housewife would sort them out, Having a nose for fish, an eye for apples.
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To be a poet is a condition rather than a profession.
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As was the custom in such cases, the pear tree was charged with murder and sentenced to be uprooted and burned.
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If I were a girl, I’d despair. The supply of good women far exceeds that of the men who deserve them.
ROBERT GRAVES