14 Robert Lowell Quotes

Robert Lowell quotes

1. A brackish reach of shoal off Madaket-- The sea was still breaking violently and night Had steamed into our North Atlantic Fleet, When the drowned sailor clutched the drag-net. Light Flashed from his matted head and marble feet, He grappled at the net With the coiled, hurdling muscles of his thighs: The corpse was bloodless, a botch of reds and whites, Its open, staring eyes Were lustreless dead-lights Or cabin-windows on a stranded hulk Heavy with sand.

2. Once fishing was a rabbit's foot-- O wind blow cold, O wind blow hot, Let suns stay in or suns step out: Life danced a jig on the sperm-whale's spout-- The fisher's fluent and obscene Catches kept his conscience clean.

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

2. It's the light of the oncoming train.

3. 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.

4. 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.

5. 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.

6. In Boston serpents whistle at the cold.

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

8. The Lord survives the rainbow of His will.

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

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

11. This is death To die and know it. This is the Black Widow, death.

12. In the end, every hypochondriac is his own prophet.