Robert Frost Quotes

333 Sourced Quotes

Our life runs down in sending up the clock.
The brook runs down in sending up our life.
The sun runs down in sending up the brook.
And there is something sending up the sun.

Robert Frost
Poetry begins in trivial metaphors, pretty metaphors, "grace" metaphors, and goes on to the profoundest thinking that we have. Poetry provides the one permissible way of saying one thing and meaning another. People say, "Why don't you say what you mean?" We never do that, do we, being all of us too much poets. We like to talk in parables and in hints and in indirections — whether from diffidence or some other instinct.

Robert Frost
By working faithfully eight hours a day, you may eventually get to be a boss and work twelve hours a day.

Robert Frost
He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

Robert Frost
I've broken Anne of gathering bouquets.
It's not fair to the child. It can't be helped though:
Pressed into service means pressed out of shape.

Robert Frost
Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting. A poem may be worked over once it is in being, but may not be worried into being. Read it a hundred times: it will forever keep its freshness as a metal keeps its fragrance. It can never lose its sense of a meaning that once unfolded by surprise as it went.

Robert Frost
There was the book of profile tales declaring
For the emboldened politicians daring
To break with followers when in the wrong,
A healthy independence of the throng,
A democratic form of right divine
To rule first answerable to high design.
There is a call to life a little sterner,
And braver for the earner, learner, yearner.
Less criticism of the field and court
And more preoccupation with the sport.

Robert Frost
But not gold in commercial quantities, Just enough gold to make the engagement rings And marriage rings of those who owned the farm. What gold more innocent could one have asked for?

Robert Frost
"Don't let him cut my hand off—
The doctor, when he comes. Don't let him, sister!"
So. But the hand was gone already.

Robert Frost
Every poem is a momentary stay against the confusion of the world.

Robert Frost
Education is... hanging around until you've caught on.

Robert Frost
A poet never takes notes. You never take notes in a love affair.

Robert Frost
Far in the pillared dark
Thrush music went —
Almost like a call to come in
To the dark and lament. But no, I was out for stars;
I would not come in.
I meant not even if asked;
And I hadn't been.

Robert Frost
I met a Californian who would
Talk California—a state so blessed,
He said, in climate, none had ever died there
A natural death.

Robert Frost
A poem begins with a lump in the throat; a home-sickness or a love-sickness. It is a reaching-out toward expression; an effort to find fulfillment. A complete poem is one where an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found the words.

Robert Frost
There was never a sound beside the wood but one,
And that was my long scythe whispering to the ground.

Robert Frost
The figure a poem makes. It begins in delight and ends in wisdom... in a clarification of life — not necessarily a great clarification, such as sects and cults are founded on, but in a momentary stay against confusion.

Robert Frost
He is all pine and I am apple orchard. My apple trees will never get across And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him. He only says, "Good fences make good neighbors.

Robert Frost
The trees that have it in their pent-up buds
To darken nature and be summer woods.

Robert Frost
He saw her from the bottom of the stairs
Before she saw him. She was starting down,
Looking back over her shoulder at some fear.
She took a doubtful step and then undid it
To raise herself and look again. He spoke
Advancing toward her: "What is it you see
From up there always?—for I want to know."

Robert Frost
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, "Good fences make good
neighbors."

Robert Frost
Do you know,
Considering the market, there are more
Poems produced than any other thing?
No wonder poets sometimes have to seem
So much more businesslike than businessmen.
Their wares are so much harder to get rid of.

Robert Frost
She's one of the two best states in the Union.
Vermont's the other.
Frost came from Vermont

Robert Frost
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down.

Robert Frost
On picking blueberries: It's a nice way to live,
Just taking what Nature is willing to give,
Not forcing her hand with harrow and plow.

Robert Frost
Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat.
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Robert Frost
The land may vary more;
But wherever the truth may be —
The water comes ashore,
And the people look at the sea.

Robert Frost
Well, who begun it?
That's what at the end of a war
We always say not who won it,
Or what it was foughten for.

Robert Frost
I alone of English writers have consciously set myself to make music out of what I may call the sound of sense.

Robert Frost
I'd like to get away from earth awhile
And then come back to it and begin over.
May no fate willfully misunderstand me
And half grant what I wish and snatch me away
Not to return. Earth's the right place for love:
I don't know where it's likely to go better.

Robert Frost