Robert Hass famous quotes

05-17-2025

It's hell writing and it's hell not writing. The only tolerable state is having just written.
-- Robert Hass

#Writing #Poetry #Hell
Take the time to write. You can do your life's work in half an hour a day.
-- Robert Hass

#Writing #Half #Hours
Longing, we say, because desire is full of endless distances.
-- Robert Hass

#Distance #Desire #Longing
Imagination runs through the places where we live like water. We need both things-a living knowledge of the land and a live imagination of it and our place in it- if we are going to preserve it.
-- Robert Hass

#Running #Land #Water
Images are not quite ideas, they are stiller than that, with less implication outside themselves. And they are not myth, they do not have the explanatory power; they are nearer to pure story. Nor are they always metaphors; they do not say this is that, they say this is.
-- Robert Hass

#Ideas #Stories #Metaphor
Not to make too much of a claim for poetry, but this is a question that goes to the moral heart of the business of any art: How do you see the world, and what right do you have to see the world in the way that you do?
-- Robert Hass

#Art #World #Too Much
I teach a lecture course on American poetry to as many as 150 students. For a lot of them, its their only elective, so this is their one shot. Theyll take the Russian Novel or American Poetry, so I want to give them the high points, the inescapable poets.
-- Robert Hass

#Giving #Want #Lectures
Ko Un is a crucial poet for the twenty-first century, and this is an enormously fresh and vivid translation.
-- Robert Hass

#Vivid #Firsts #Twenties
A word is elegy to what it signifies.
-- Robert Hass

#Silence #Elegy
The first book that really knocked me out was the 'Brothers Karamazov.' I read it when I was a senior in high school.
-- Robert Hass

#Senior #Brother #Book
When I was in college, I lost my scholarship one year. I had enough money for tuition, but not room and board. So I camped in the hills.
-- Robert Hass

#College #Years #Tuition
Writing is an incessant process of discovery.
-- Robert Hass

#Writing #Discovery #Process
When I was in high school in the '50s you were supposed to be an Elvis Presley, a James Dean, a Marlon Brando or a Kingston Trio type in a button-down shirt headed for the fraternities at Stanford or Cal.
-- Robert Hass

#School #Trios #Buttons
What we usually find is that when people think they have a new idea or approach something for the first time, it is actually a recurrence of a line of thinking explored in the past.
-- Robert Hass

#Past #Thinking #Ideas
Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings, saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.
-- Robert Hass

#Evening #Afternoon #Blackberries
Sometimes from this hillside just after sunset The rim of the sky takes on a tinge Of the palest green, like the flesh of a cucumber When you peel it carefully.
-- Robert Hass

#Sunset #Sky #Green
After a while I understood that, talking this way, everything dissolves: justice, pine, hair, woman, you and I. There was a woman I made love to and I remembered how, holding her small shoulders in my hands sometimes, I felt a violent wonder at her presence like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river with its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat, muddy places where we caught the little orange-silver fish called pumpkinseed. It hardly had to do with her. Longing, we say, because desire is full of endless distances.
-- Robert Hass

#Distance #Silly #Islands
The Earth forgives the previous year every year.
-- Robert Hass

#Years #Forgiving #Earth
I think that the job of poetry, its political job, is to refresh the idea of justice, which is going dead in us all the time.
-- Robert Hass

#Jobs #Thinking #Ideas
Nostalgia locates desire in the past where it suffers no active conflict and can be yearned toward pleasantly.
-- Robert Hass

#Past #Suffering #Desire
One may prefer spring and summer to autumn and winter, but preference is hardly to the point. The earth turns, and we live in the grain of nature, turning with it.
-- Robert Hass

#Summer #Spring #Autumn
Golf is a worrier's game, inward, concentrated, a matter of inches, invented by the same people who gave us Presbyterianism.
-- Robert Hass

#Golf #Games #People
It is good sometimes for poetry to disenchant us.
-- Robert Hass

#Sometimes
Poetry is a fireplace in summer or a fan in winter.
-- Robert Hass

#Summer #Winter #Fans
In California in the early Spring, There are pale yellow mornings, when the mist burns slowly into day, The air stings like Autumn, clarifies like pain - Well, I have dreamed this coast myself.
-- Robert Hass

#Morning #Pain #Spring
The birds are silent in the woods. / Just wait: soon enough / You will be quiet too
-- Robert Hass

#Bird #Waiting #Woods
All the new thinking is about loss. In this it resembles all the old thinking
-- Robert Hass

#Loss #Thinking
Justice is the well water of the city of/ Novgorod, black and sweet
-- Robert Hass

#Sweet #Cities #Justice

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