Robert Graves Quotes

142 Sourced Quotes

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
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
Anthropologists are a connecting link between poets and scientists; though their field-work among primitive peoples has often made them forget the language of science.

Robert Graves
Trench stinks of shallow buried dead
Where Tom stands at the periscope,
Tired out. After nine months he's shed
All fear, all faith, all hate, all hope.

Robert Graves
I am an old man
With my bones very brittle,
Though I am a poor old man
Worth very little,
Yet I suck at my long pipe
At peace in the sun,
I do not fret nor much regret
That my work is done.

Robert Graves
In love as in sport, the amateur status must be strictly maintained.

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

Robert Graves
She tells her love while half asleep, In the dark hours, With half-words whispered low: As Earth stirs in her winter sleep And puts out grass and flowers Despite the snow, Despite the falling snow.

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
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
Down on his knees he sinks, the stiff-necked King,
Stoops and kneels and grovels, chin to the mud.
Out from his changed heart flutter on startled wing
The fancy birds of his Pride, Honour, Kinglihood.
He crawls, he grunts, he is beast-like, frogs and snails
His diet, and grass, and water with hand for cup.
He herds with brutes that have hooves and horns and tails,
He roars in his anger, he scratches, he looks not up.

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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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