Robert Lowell Quotes

49 Sourced Quotes

We feel the machine slipping from our hands
As if someone else were steering;
If we see light at the end of the tunnel,
It's the light of the oncoming train.

Robert Lowell
I saw the sky descending, black and white,
Not blue, on Boston.

Robert Lowell
The aquarium is gone. Everywhere,
giant finned cars nose forward like fish;
a savage servility
slides by on grease.

Robert Lowell
O to break loose, like the chinook salmon jumping and falling back, nosing up to the impossible stone and bone-crushing waterfall.

Robert Lowell
We are old-timers,
each of us holds a locked razor.

Robert Lowell
Folly comes from something –
the present, yes,
we are in it,
it's the infection
of things gone.

Robert Lowell
We are like a lot of wild spiders crying together, but without tears.

Robert Lowell
The line must terminate.
Yet my heart rises, I know I've gladdened a lifetime knotting, undoing a fishnet of tarred rope; the net will hang on the wall when the fish are eaten,
nailed like illegible bronze on the futureless future.

Robert Lowell
No one like one's mother and father ever lived.

Robert Lowell
The scythers, Time and Death,
Helmed locusts, move upon the tree of breath

Robert Lowell
Flabby, bald, lobotomized,
he drifted in a sheepish calm,
where no agonizing reappraisal
jarred his concentration on the electric chair —
hanging like an oasis in his air
of lost connections.

Robert Lowell
Your old-fashioned tirade —
loving, rapid, merciless —
breaks like the Atlantic Ocean on my head.

Robert Lowell
Father, forgive me my injuries, as I forgive those I have injured! You never climbed Mount Sion, yet left dinosaur death-steps on the crust, where I must walk.

Robert Lowell
We are poor passing facts,
warned by that to give
each figure in the photograph
his living name.

Robert Lowell
If I could go through it all again, the slender iron rungs of growing up, I would be as young as any, a child lost in unreality and loud music.

Robert Lowell
I will catch Christ with a greased worm,
And when the Prince of Darkness stalks
My bloodstream to its Stygian term...
On water the Man-Fisher walks.

Robert Lowell
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.

Robert Lowell
It has taken me the time since you died
to discover you are as human as I am...
if I am.

Robert Lowell
I'm sure that writing isn't a craft, that is, something for which you learn the skills and go on turning out. It must come from some deep impulse, deep inspiration. That can't be taught, it can't be what you use in teaching.

Robert Lowell
Talking about the past is like a cat's trying to explain climbing down a ladder,

Robert Lowell
Christ walks on the black water. In Black Mud Darts the kingfisher. On Corpus Christi, heart, Over the drum-beat of St. Stephen's choir I hear him, Stupor Mundi, and the mud Flies from his hunching wings and beak—my heart, The blue kingfisher dives on you in fire.

Robert Lowell
Most poetry is very formal, but when a modern poet is formal he gets more attention for it than old poets did.

Robert Lowell
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.

Robert Lowell
My mind's not right.
A car radio bleats,
"Love, O careless Love...." I hear my ill-spirit sob in each blood cell, as if my hand were at its throat....
I myself am hell;
nobody's here.

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

Robert Lowell