Robert Graves Quotes

142 Sourced Quotes

If I were a girl, I'd despair. The supply of good women far exceeds that of the men who deserve them.

Robert Graves
The remarkable thing about Shakespeare is that he is really very good — in spite of all the people who say he is very good.

Robert Graves
Faults in English prose derive not so much from lack of knowledge, intelligence or art as from lack of thought, patience or goodwill.

Robert Graves
As you are woman, so be lovely:
As you are lovely, so be various,
Merciful as constant, constant as various,
So be mine, as I yours for ever.

Robert Graves
Poets are guardians
Of a shadowy island
With granges and forest
Warmed by the Moon

Robert Graves
Love, Fear and Hate and Childish Toys
Are here discreetly blent;
Admire, you ladies, read, you boys,
My Country Sentiment.

Robert Graves
He found a formula for drawing comic rabbits:
This formula for drawing comic rabbits paid.
Till in the end he could not change the tragic habits
This formula for drawing comic rabbits made.

Robert Graves
Strawberries that in gardens grow
Are plump and juicy fine,
But sweeter far as wise men know
Spring from the woodland vine.
No need for bowl or silver spoon,
Sugar or spice or cream,
Has the wild berry plucked in June
Beside the trickling stream.
One such to melt at the tongue's root,
Confounding taste with scent,
Beats a full peck of garden fruit:
Which points my argument.

Robert Graves
A difficult achievement for true lovers
Is to lie mute, without embrace or kiss,
Without a rustle or a smothered sigh,
Basking each in the other's glory.

Robert Graves
The award of a pure gold medal for poetry would flatter the recipient unduly: no poem ever attains such carat purity.

Robert Graves
Cuinchy bred rats. They came up from the canal, fed on the plentiful corpses, and multiplied exceedingly. While I stayed here with the Welsh, a new officer joined the company... When he turned in that night, he heard a scuffling, shone his torch on the bed, and found two rats on his blanket tussling for the possession of a severed hand.

Robert Graves
Hate is a fear, and fear is rot
That cankers root and fruit alike,
Fight cleanly then, hate not, fear not,
Strike with no madness when you strike.

Robert Graves
If I were a young man
With my bones full of marrow,
Oh, if I were a bold young man
Straight as an arrow,
I'd store up no virtue
For Heaven's distant plain,
I'd live at ease as I did please
And sin once again.

Robert Graves
Immeasurable at every hour:
He first taught lovers how to kiss,
He brings down sunshine after shower,
Thunder and hate are his also,
He is YES and he is NO.

Robert Graves
There was a daily exchange of courtesies between our machine guns and the Germans' at stand-to; by removing cartridges from the ammunition-belt one could rap out the rhythm of the familiar prostitutes' call: "MEET me DOWN in PICC-a-DILL-y", to which the Germans would reply, though in slower tempo, because our guns were faster than theirs: "YES, with-OUT my DRAWERS ON!"

Robert Graves
Hate and Fear are not wanted here,
Nor Toys nor Country Lovers,
Everything they took from my new poem book
But the flyleaf and the covers.

Robert Graves
When a dream is born in you
With a sudden clamorous pain,
When you know the dream is true
And lovely, with no flaw nor stain,
O then, be careful, or with sudden clutch
You'll hurt the delicate thing you prize so much.

Robert Graves
The difference between prose logic and poetic thought is simple. The logician uses words as a builder uses bricks, for the unemotional deadness of his academic prose; and is always coining newer, deader words with a natural preference for Greek formations.

Robert Graves
LSD reminds me of the minks that escape from mink-farms and breed in the forest and become dangerous and destructive. It has escaped from the drug factory and gets made in college laboratories.

Robert Graves
I do not love the Sabbath,
The soapsuds and the starch,
The troops of solemn people
Who to Salvation march.
I take my book, I take my stick
On the Sabbath day,
In woody nooks and valleys
I hide myself away.
To ponder there in quiet
God's Universal Plan,
Resolved that church and Sabbath
Were never made for man.

Robert Graves
She in left hand bears a leafy quince;
When with her right she crooks a finger, smiling,
How may the King hold back?
Royally then he barters life for love.

Robert Graves
Lovers today and for all time
Preserve the meaning of my rhyme:
Love is not kindly nor yet grim
But does to you as you to him.

Robert Graves
As was the custom in such cases, the pear tree was charged with murder and sentenced to be uprooted and burned.

Robert Graves
With a fork drive Nature out,
She will ever yet return;
Hedge the flowerbed all about,
Pull or stab or cut or burn,
She will ever yet return.

Robert Graves
Let Cupid smile and the fiend must flee;
Hey and hither, my lad.

Robert Graves
Impossible men: idle, illiterate,
Self-pitying, dirty, sly,
For whose appearance even in City Parks
Excuses must be made to casual passers-by.
Has God's supply of tolerable husbands Fallen, in fact, so low Or do I always over-value woman At the expense of man?
Do I?
It might be so.

Robert Graves
He is older than the seas,
Older than the plains and hills,
And older than the light that spills
From the sun's hot wheel on these.
He wakes the gale that tears your trees,
He sings to you from window sills.

Robert Graves
Love is a universal migraine.
A bright stain on the vision
Blotting out reason.

Robert Graves
When I'm killed, don't think of me
Buried there in Cambrin Wood,
Nor as in Zion think of me
With the Intolerable Good.
And there's one thing that I know well,
I'm damned if I'll be damned to Hell!

Robert Graves
Truth-loving Persians do not dwell upon
The trivial skirmish fought near Marathon.

Robert Graves