Robinson Jeffers Quotes

90 Sourced Quotes

O that our souls could scale a height like this,
A mighty mountain swept o'er by the bleak
Keen winds of heaven; and, standing on that peak
Above the blinding clouds of prejudice,
Would we could see all truly as it is;
The calm eternal truth would keep us meek.

Robinson Jeffers
I sadly smiling remember that the flower fades to make fruit, the fruit rots
to make earth.

Robinson Jeffers
Now the spoiler has come: does it care?
Not faintly. It has all time. It knows the people are a tide
That swells and in time will ebb, and all
Their works dissolve. Meanwhile the image of the pristine beauty
Lives in the very grain of the granite,
Safe as the endless ocean that climbs our cliff. — As for us:
We must uncenter our minds from ourselves;
We must unhumanize our views a little, and become confident
As the rock and ocean that we were made from.

Robinson Jeffers
The gang serves lies, the passionate
Man plays his part; the cold passion for truth
Hunts in no pack.

Robinson Jeffers
The world's God is treacherous and full of
unreason.

Robinson Jeffers
I have seen these ways of God: I know of no reason
For fire and change and torture and the old returnings.

Robinson Jeffers
As for me, I would rather Be a worm in a wild apple than a son of man.

Robinson Jeffers
You ask what I am for and what I am against in Spain. I would give my right hand of course to prevent the agony; I would not give a flick of my little finger to help either side win.

Robinson Jeffers
And boys, be in nothing so moderate as in love of man, a clever servant,
insufferable master.
There is the trap that catches noblest spirits, that caught — they say —
God, when he walked on earth.

Robinson Jeffers
When the sun shouts and people abound
One thinks there were the ages of stone and the age of bronze
And the iron age; iron the unstable metal;
Steel made of iron, unstable as his mother; the towered-up cities
Will be stains of rust on mounds of plaster.
Roots will not pierce the heaps for a time, kind rains will cure them,
Then nothing will remain of the iron age
And all these people but a thigh-bone or so, a poem
Stuck in the world's thought, splinters of glass
In the rubbish dumps, a concrete dam far off in the mountain...

Robinson Jeffers
The long migrations meet across you and it is nothing to you, you have forgotten us, mother.
You were much younger when we crawled out of the womb and lay in the sun's eye on the tideline. It was long and long ago; we have grown proud since then and you have grown bitter; life retains
Your mobile soft unquiet strength; and envies hardness, the insolent quietness of stone.

Robinson Jeffers
Against the outcrop boulders of a raised beach
We built our house when I and my love were young.

Robinson Jeffers
Happy people die whole, they are all dissolved in a moment,
they have had what they wanted

Robinson Jeffers
Then what is the answer? — Not to be deluded by dreams.
To know that great civilizations have broken down into violence, and their tyrants come, many times before.
When open violence appears, to avoid it with honor or choose the least ugly faction; these evils are essential.
To keep one's own integrity, be merciful and uncorrupted and not wish for evil; and not be duped
By dreams of universal justice or happiness. These dreams will not be fulfilled.

Robinson Jeffers
That public men publish falsehoods
Is nothing new. That America must accept
Like the historical republics corruption and empire
Has been known for years.
Be angry at the sun for setting
If these things anger you.

Robinson Jeffers
Here from this mountain shore, headland beyond stormy headland
plunging like dolphins through the blue sea-smoke
Into pale sea — look west at the hill of water: it is half the planet:
this dome, this half-globe, this bulging
Eyeball of water, arched over to Asia,
Australia and white Antarctica: those are the eyelids that never close;
this is the staring unsleeping
Eye of the earth; and what it watches is not our wars.

Robinson Jeffers
I hate my verses, every line, every word.
Oh pale and brittle pencils ever to try
One grass-blade's curve, or the throat of one bird
That clings to twig, ruffled against white sky.
Oh cracked and twilight mirrors ever to catch
One color, one glinting flash, of the splendor of things.

Robinson Jeffers
Mother, though my song's measure is like your surf-beat's ancient rhythm I never learned it of you.
Before there was any water there were tides of fire, both our tones flow from the older fountain.

Robinson Jeffers
The tides are in our veins, we still mirror the stars, life is your child, but there is in me
Older and harder than life and more impartial, the eye that watched before there was an ocean.

Robinson Jeffers
This wild swan of a world is no hunter's game.
Better bullets than yours would miss the white breast
Better mirrors than yours would crack in the flame.
Does it matter whether you hate your... self?
At least Love your eyes that can see, your mind that can
Hear the music, the thunder of the wings. Love the wild swan.

Robinson Jeffers
Dear God, who are the whole splendor of things and the sacred
stars, but also the cruelty and greed, the treacheries
And vileness, insanities and filth and anguish: now that this
thing comes near us again I am finding it hard
To praise you with a whole heart.

Robinson Jeffers
Stone-cutters fighting time with marble, you fore-defeated
Challengers of oblivion
Eat cynical earnings, knowing rock splits, records fall down,
The square-limbed Roman letters
Scale in the thaws, wear in the rain.

Robinson Jeffers
The rock-cheeks have red fire-stains.
But the place was maiden, no previous
Building, no neighbors, nothing but the elements,
Rock, wind, and sea; in moon-struck nights the mountain
Coyotes howled in our dooryard; or doe and fawn
Stared in the lamplit window, We raised two boys here
All that we saw or heard was beautiful
And hardly human. Oh heavy change.
The world deteriorates like a rotting apple, worms and a skin.
They have built streets around us, new houses
Line them and cars obsess them — and my dearest has died.
The ocean at least is not changed at all, Cold, grim, and faithful; and I still keep a hard edge of forest
Haunted by long gray squirrels and hoarse herons.

Robinson Jeffers
Keep clear of the dupes that talk democracy
And the dogs that talk revolution,
Drunk with talk, liars and believers.
I believe in my tusks.
Long live freedom and damn the ideologies.

Robinson Jeffers
I decided not to tell lies in verse. Not to feign any emotions that I did not feel.

Robinson Jeffers
I think, here is your emblem
To hang in the future sky;
Not the cross, not the hive,
But this; bright power, dark peace;
Fierce consciousness joined with final
Disinterestedness;
Life with calm death; the falcon's
Realist eyes and act
Married to the massive
Mysticism of stone,
Which failure cannot cast down
Nor success make proud.

Robinson Jeffers
The deep dark-shining Pacific leans on the land, Feeling his cold strength To the outmost margins.

Robinson Jeffers
I will have shepherds for my philosophers,
Tall dreary men lying on the hills all night
Watching the stars, let their dogs watch the sheep. And I'll have lunatics
For my poets, strolling from farm to farm, wild liars distorting
The country news into supernaturalism —
For all men to such minds are devils or gods — and that increases
Man's dignity, man's importance, necessary lies
Best told by fools.

Robinson Jeffers
Lend me the stone strength of the past and I will lend you The wings of the future, for I have them.

Robinson Jeffers
Well: the day is a poem but too much Like one of Jeffers's, crusted with blood and barbaric omens, Painful to excess, inhuman as a hawk's cry.

Robinson Jeffers