Robert Hass Quotes

It's hell writing and it's hell not writing. The only tolerable state is having just written.

Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings, saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.

Take the time to write. You can do your life's work in half an hour a day.

Longing, we say, because desire is full of endless distances.

Poetry is a fireplace in summer or a fan in winter.

If you're imaginatively responsible to the place you live in, you understand the watershed.

The birds are silent in the woods. / Just wait: soon enough / You will be quiet too

Imagination runs through the places where we live like water. We need both things-a living knowledge of the land and a live imagination of it and our place in it- if we are going to preserve it.

Writing is an incessant process of discovery.

Repetition makes us feel secure and variation makes us feel free.

One may prefer spring and summer to autumn and winter, but preference is hardly to the point. The earth turns, and we live in the grain of nature, turning with it.

The Earth forgives the previous year every year.

In California in the early Spring, There are pale yellow mornings, when the mist burns slowly into day, The air stings like Autumn, clarifies like pain - Well, I have dreamed this coast myself.

Nostalgia locates desire in the past where it suffers no active conflict and can be yearned toward pleasantly.

Sometimes from this hillside just after sunset The rim of the sky takes on a tinge Of the palest green, like the flesh of a cucumber When you peel it carefully.

A movement got started for common schools, and by the end of the 19th century, 91 percent of Americans could read and write.

The first book that really knocked me out was the 'Brothers Karamazov.' I read it when I was a senior in high school.

All the new thinking is about loss. In this it resembles all the old thinking

I think that the job of poetry, its political job, is to refresh the idea of justice, which is going dead in us all the time.

Golf is a worrier's game, inward, concentrated, a matter of inches, invented by the same people who gave us Presbyterianism.

Milton was the first person who really experimented with putting politics into sonnets.

One way to escape the universe in which everything is a kind of media cartoon is to write about the part of your life that doesn't feel like a cartoon, and how the cartoon comes into it.

Do poets have any insight into what's the right ratio? I doubt it, but I think that they can be awake to what the ends are.

Where politics is concerned, I think poets have to be pragmatists, philosophical pragmatists.

If you ask me if I have this or that principle, tell me what its consequences are, and then I'll tell you whether I have that principle or not.

[Osip] Mandelstam was killed by Stalinist forces.

At some level, you have to be able to say, "This is my task." It's in small, local ways that you keep yourself alive and refresh ideas that are always going into dead abstraction.

As an artist, you have the job of working out whatever is given you to work out.

Sometimes you have to be less ashamed about writing a bad poem than you would be about being silent.

What we usually find is that when people think they have a new idea or approach something for the first time, it is actually a recurrence of a line of thinking explored in the past.

Someone in Ireland asked me how many Republican poets there were in the U.S., and I thought maybe two. Maybe there are 10,000 poets, and maybe there are two Republicans among them.

Our history doesn't look at our own violence, the violence in our own past, and we go out and repeat it someplace else.

We don't know our own story.

The professionalization of poetry, or the balkanization, has come out of the fact that when you apply to most creative writing programs, you have to choose your genre.

There's very little solid research on readership, yet people make pronouncements about it all the time.

One thing we do know is that mass literacy is a product of the 19th century, at least in English-speaking cultures - Ireland, England, Scotland, Canada, and the U. S.

I think it's true to say that in 1973 I could read every book of poems that was published in a year, and I did.

If you read three books a day you couldn't read all the poetry that's being published.

When I was in college, I lost my scholarship one year. I had enough money for tuition, but not room and board. So I camped in the hills.

It is good sometimes for poetry to disenchant us.

Justice is the well water of the city of Novgorod, black and sweet.

I was aware that a quarter of the children in the country are born in poverty, and that the condition of public schools in California was disastrous.

Haiku is an art that seems dedicated to making people pay attention to the preciousness and particularity of every moment of existence. I think that poetry can do that.

I suppose there's something to be said for the sheer reinforcement of our beliefs, but really I think poetry is more useful as disenchantment than enchantment.

I thought it was irrelevant to talk about what a wonderful thing poetry was if you didn't teach people to read.

I think that what art can do is refresh our sense of justice, wake us up to what we've taken for granted in the political realm, as in the other realms.

Poetry is a man arguing with himself; rhetoric is a man arguing with others.

My suspicion is that once you have literacy in place, the readership has not changed very much.

Ko Un is a crucial poet for the twenty-first century, and this is an enormously fresh and vivid translation.

Someone will always want to mobilize Death on a massive scale for economic Domination or revenge. And the task, taken As a task, appeals to the imagination. The military is an engineering profession.