Robert Graves Short Quotes

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To be a poet is a condition rather than a profession.

Robert Graves
If there's no money in poetry, neither is there poetry in money.

Robert Graves
Prose books are the show dogs I breed and sell to support my cat.

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

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

Robert Graves
I made no more protests. What was the use of struggling against fate

Robert Graves
Take courage, lover!
Could you endure such pain
At any hand but hers?

Robert Graves
The gift of independence once granted cannot be lightly taken away again.

Robert Graves
A perfect poem is impossible. Once it had been written, the world would end.

Robert Graves
For words of rapture groping, they"Never such love," swore "ever before was!"

Robert Graves
And what of home — how goes it, boys,
While we die here in stench and noise?

Robert Graves
To evoke posterity
Is to weep on your own grave,
Ventriloquizing for the unborn.

Robert Graves
Marriage, like money, is still with us; and, like money, progressively devalued.

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

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

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

Robert Graves
Any honest housewife would sort them out,/ Having a nose for fish, an eye for apples.

Robert Graves
What we now call "finance" is, I hold, an intellectual perversion of what began as warm human love.

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

Robert Graves
Far away is close at hand
Close joined is far away,
Love shall come at your command
Yet will not stay.

Robert Graves
Riding on the shell and shot.
He smites you down, he succours you,
And where you seek him, he is not.

Robert Graves
You mean that people who continue virtuous in an old-fashioned way must inevitably suffer in times like these?

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
I was thinking, "So, I'm Emperor, am I? What nonsense! But at least I'll be able to make people read my books now.

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
Counting the beats,
Counting the slow heart beats,
The bleeding to death of time in slow heart beats,
Wakeful they lie.

Robert Graves
Are not all centuries, like men,
Born hopeful too and gay,
And good for seventy years, but then
Hope slowly seeps away?

Robert Graves
The child alone a poet is:
Spring and Fairyland are his.
Truth and Reason show but dim,
And all's poetry with him.

Robert Graves
Beware, madam, of the witty devil,
The arch intriguer who walks disguised
In a poet's cloak, his gay tongue oozing evil.

Robert Graves
New beginnings and new shoots
Spring again from hidden roots
Pull or stab or cut or burn,
Love must ever yet return.

Robert Graves