Robert Lowell Quotes

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

In the end, there is no end.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

I was overcome with an attack of pathological enthusiasm.

It's the light of the oncoming train.

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.

I myself am hell; nobody's here

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

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

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

In the end, every hypochondriac is his own prophet.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

The Lord survives the rainbow of His will.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

Animalsfattened for your for your arena suffered lessthan you in dying-yours the lawlessnessof something simple that has lost its law, my namesake, and the last Caligula.

What we love we are.

The light at the end of the tunnel is just the light of an oncoming train.