Robert Lowell Quotes

49 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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
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
Oh my Petite,
clearest of all God's creatures, still all air and nerve.

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
I doodle handlebar
moustaches on the last Russian Czar.

Robert Lowell
This is death.
To die and know it. This is the Black Widow, death.

Robert Lowell
These are the tranquillized Fifties,
and I am forty. Ought I to regret my seedtime?
I was a fire-breathing Catholic C.O., and made my manic statement, telling off the state and president, and then sat waiting sentence in the bull pen beside a Negro boy with curlicues of marijuana in his hair.

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
I am tired. Everyone's tired of my turmoil.

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

Robert Lowell
Pity the planet, all joy gone
from this sweet volcanic cone;
peace to our children when they fall
in small war on the heels of small
war.

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

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

Robert Lowell
I keep no rank nor station.
Cured, I am frizzled, stale and small.

Robert Lowell
On Boylston Street, a commercial photograph shows Hiroshima boiling.

Robert Lowell
Gored by the climacteric of his want, he stalls above me like an elephant.

Robert Lowell