Robert Lowell famous quotes

If youth is a defect, it is one we outgrow too soon.
-- Robert Lowell

#Youth #Defects

Sometimes nothing is so solid to me as writing - I suppose that's what a vocation means - at times a torment, a bad conscience, but all in all, purpose and direction.
-- Robert Lowell

#Mean #Writing #Purpose

But sometimes everything I write with the threadbare art of my eye seems a snapshot
-- Robert Lowell

#Art #Writing #Eye

Those blessed structures, plot and rhyme-- why are they no help to me now I want to make something imagined, not recalled?
-- Robert Lowell

#Blessed #Poetry #Plot

What can the dove of Jesus give You now but wisdom, exile? Stand and live, The dove has brought an olive branch to eat.
-- Robert Lowell

#Wisdom #Jesus #Giving

I will catch Christ with a greased worm, And when the Prince of Darkness stalks My bloodstream to its Stygian term . . . On water the Man-Fisher walks.
-- Robert Lowell

#Men #Fishing #Water

Once fishing was a rabbit's foot-- O wind blow cold, O wind blow hot
-- Robert Lowell

#Blow #Wind #Fishing

Wallowing in this bloody sty, I cast for fish that pleased my eye
-- Robert Lowell

#Eye #Fishing #Wallowing

the scythers, Time and Death, Helmed locusts, move upon the tree of breath
-- Robert Lowell

#Death #Time #Moving

Pity the planet, all joy gone from this sweet volcanic cone
-- Robert Lowell

#Sweet #Joy #Gone

It is night, And it is vanity, and age Blackens the heart of Adam. Fear, The yellow chirper, beaks its cage.
-- Robert Lowell

#Fear #Heart #Night

Life begins to happen. My hoppped up husband drops his home disputes, and hits the streets to cruise for prostitutes
-- Robert Lowell

#Marriage #Husband #Home

I myself am hell; nobody's here
-- Robert Lowell

#Hell

Poetry is not the record of an event: it is an event.
-- Robert Lowell

#Art #Poetry #Records

It's a completely powerful and serious book, as good as anything in prose or poetry written by a 'beat' writer, and one of the most alive books written by any American for years. I don't see how it could be considered immoral.
-- Robert Lowell

#Powerful #Book #Years

Their monument sticks like a fishbone in the city's throat.
-- Robert Lowell

#Sea #Fishing #Cities

In the end, there is no end.
-- Robert Lowell

#Ends

Everywhere, giant finned cars nose forward like fish; a savage servility slides by on grease.
-- Robert Lowell

#Car #Grease #Noses

September twenty-second, Sir, the bough cracks with unpicked apples, and at dawn the small-mouth bass breaks water, gorged with spawn.
-- Robert Lowell

#Apples #Water #Cracks

I want to apologize for plaguing you with so many telephone calls last November and December. When the 'enthusiasm' is coming on me it is accompanied by a feverish reaching out to my friends. After its over I wince and wither.
-- Robert Lowell

#Depression #Want #Enthusiasm

I'm sure that writing isn't a craft, that is, something for which you learn the skills and go on turning out. It must come from some deep impulse, deep inspiration. That can't be taught, it can't be what you use in teaching.
-- Robert Lowell

#Teaching #Inspiration #Writing

Talking about the past is like a cat's trying to explain climbing down a ladder,
-- Robert Lowell

#Cat #Past #Talking

History has to live with what was here, clutching and close to fumbling all we had - it is so dull and gruesome how we die, unlike writing, life never finishes.
-- Robert Lowell

#Writing #Dull #Writing Life

We are all old-timers, each of us holds a locked razor.
-- Robert Lowell

#Razors #Timer

Pity the planet, all joy gone from this sweet volcanic cone; peace to our children when they fall in small war on the heel of small war--until the end of time to police the earth, a ghost orbiting forever lost in our monotonous sublime
-- Robert Lowell

#Sweet #Children #War

I saw the spiders marching through the air, Swimming from tree to tree that mildewed day In latter August when the hay Came creaking to the barn.
-- Robert Lowell

#Swimming #Air #August

I saw the spiders marching through the air, Swimming from tree to tree that mildewed day In latter August when the hay Came creaking to the barn. But where The wind is westerly, Where gnarled November makes the spiders fly Into the apparitions of the sky, They purpose nothing but their ease and die Urgently beating east to sunrise and the sea;
-- Robert Lowell

#Swimming #Air #August

And blue-lung'd combers lumbered to the kill.
-- Robert Lowell

#Blue

In the end, every hypochondriac is his own prophet.
-- Robert Lowell

#Prophet #Ends #Hypochondriac

Middle Age At forty-five, What next, what next? At every corner, I meet my Father, My age, still alive.
-- Robert Lowell

#Father #Age #Alive

The Lord survives the rainbow of His will.
-- Robert Lowell

#Rainbow #Lord

I was overcome with an attack of pathological enthusiasm.
-- Robert Lowell

#Overcoming #Enthusiasm