Robert Lowell Quotes

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

Poetry is not the record of an event: it is an event.

We feel the machine slipping from our hands As if someone else were steering; If we see light at the end of the tunnel, It's the light of the oncoming train.

The world is absolutely out of control now and is not going to be saved by any reason or unreason.

In the end, there is no end.

Talking about the past is like a cat's trying to explain climbing down a ladder.

I was overcome with an attack of pathological enthusiasm.

I myself am hell; nobody's here

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.

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.

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

In the end, every hypochondriac is his own prophet.

Most poetry is very formal, but when a modern poet is formal he gets more attention for it than old poets did.

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.

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

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.

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

It's the light of the oncoming train.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.