To be a poet is a condition rather than a profession.
ROBERT GRAVESAs was the custom in such cases, the pear tree was charged with murder and sentenced to be uprooted and burned.
More Robert Graves Quotes
-
-
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.
ROBERT GRAVES -
Any honest housewife would sort them out, Having a nose for fish, an eye for apples.
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 -
The gift of independence once granted cannot be lightly taken away again.
ROBERT GRAVES -
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!
ROBERT GRAVES -
The butterfly, a cabbage-white, (His honest idiocy of flight) Will never now, it is too late, Master the art of flying straight.
ROBERT GRAVES -
So when I’m killed, don’t wait for me, Walking the dim corridor; In Heaven or Hell, don’t wait for me, Or you must wait for evermore. You’ll find me buried, living-dead In these verses that you’ve read.
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 is one story and one story only.
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 -
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.
ROBERT GRAVES -
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.
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 -
Though philosophers like to define poetry as irrational fancy, for us it is practical, humorous, reasonable way of being ourselves.
ROBERT GRAVES -
But give thanks, at least, that you still have Frost’s poems; and when you feel the need of solitude, retreat to the companionship of moon, water, hills and trees. Retreat, he reminds us, should not be confused with escape. And take these poems along for good luck!
ROBERT GRAVES