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
Once fishing was a rabbit's foot—
O wind blow cold, O wind blow hot,
Let suns stay in or suns step out:
Life danced a jig on the sperm-whale's spout—
The fisher's fluent and obscene
Catches kept his conscience clean.

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

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

Robert Lowell
Now Paris, our black classic, breaking up like killer kings on an Etruscan cup.

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

Robert Lowell
A brackish reach of shoal off Madaket—
The sea was still breaking violently and night
Had steamed into our North Atlantic Fleet,
When the drowned sailor clutched the drag-net. Light
Flashed from his matted head and marble feet,
He grappled at the net
With the coiled, hurdling muscles of his thighs:
The corpse was bloodless, a botch of reds and whites,
Its open, staring eyes
Were lustreless dead-lights
Or cabin-windows on a stranded hulk
Heavy with sand.

Robert Lowell
Rome, if built at all, must be built in a day.

Robert Lowell
After loving you so much, can I forget you for eternity, and have no other choice?

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
At forty-five,
What next, what next?
At every corner,
I meet my Father,
my age, still alive.

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
You said:
"We poets in our youth begin in sadness; thereof in the end come despondency and madness."

Robert Lowell
Only teaching on Tuesdays, bookworming in pajamas fresh from the washer each morning, I hog a whole house on Boston's "hardly passionate Marlborough Street."

Robert Lowell
I — really I can do little, as little now as then, about the infernal fires — I cannot blow out a match.

Robert Lowell
This pioneer democracy, built on foundations, not of rock, but blood hard as rock.

Robert Lowell
Who asks for me, the Shelley of my age, must lay his heart out for my bed and board.

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

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
Wallowing in this bloody sty,
I cast for fish that pleased my eye

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
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 is night,
And it is vanity, and age
Blackens the heart of Adam. Fear,
The yellow chirper, beaks its cage.

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

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
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
Two months after marching through Boston, half the regiment was dead; at the dedication, William James could almost hear the bronze Negroes breathe. Their monument sticks like a fishbone in the city's throat. Its Colonel is as lean as a compass-needle. He has an angry wrenlike vigilance, a greyhound's gentle tautness; he seems to wince at pleasure, and suffocate for privacy.

Robert Lowell
When I crouch to my television set, the drained faces of Negro school-children rise like balloons.

Robert Lowell