The butterfly, a cabbage-white, (His honest idiocy of flight) Will never now, it is too late, Master the art of flying straight.
ROBERT GRAVESFaults in English prose derive not so much from lack of knowledge, intelligence or art as from lack of thought, patience or goodwill.
More Robert Graves Quotes
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Any honest housewife would sort them out,/ Having a nose for fish, an eye for apples.
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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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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.
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To be a poet is a condition rather than a profession.
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Love is a universal migraine. A bright stain on the vision, Blotting out reason.
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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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Hardly one soldier in a hundred was inspired by religious feeling of even the crudest kind. It would have been difficult to remain religious in the trenches even if one had survived the irreligion of the training battalion at home.
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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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This seems to me a philosophical question, and therefore irrelevant, question. A poet’s destiny is to love.
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Love at first sight’some say misnaming Discovery of twinned helplessness Against the huge tug of procreation. But friendship at first sight? This also Catches fiercely at the surprised heart So that the cheek blanches then blushes.
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No honest theologian therefore can deny that his acceptance of Jesus as Christ logically binds every Christian to a belief in reincarnation – in Elias case (who was later John the Baptist) at least.
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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.
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Entrance and exit wounds are silvered clean, The track aches only when the rain reminds. The one-legged man forgets his leg of wood, The one-armed man his jointed wooden arm. The blinded man sees with his ears and hands As much or more than once with both his eyes.
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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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Genius not only diagnoses the situation but supplies the answers.
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