Robinson Jeffers Quotes
You making haste on decay: not blameworthy; life is good, be it stubbornly long or suddenly A mortal splendor: meteors are not needed less than mountains: shine, perishing republic.
Cruelty is a part of nature, at least of human nature, but it is the one thing that seems unnatural to us.
A little too abstract, a little too wise, It is time for us to kiss the earth again, It is time to let the leaves rain from the skies, Let the rich life run to the roots again.
Happy people die whole, they are all dissolved in a moment, they have had what they wanted.
Poetry is not a civilizer, rather the reverse, for great poetry appeals to the most primitive instincts.
The world's in a bad way, my man, And bound to be worse before it mends; Better lie up in the mountain here Four or five centuries, While the stars go over the lonely ocean.
I've changed my ways a little, I cannot now Run with you in the evenings along the shore, Except in a kind of dream, and you, if you dream a moment, You see me there.
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.
The greatest beauty is organic wholeness, the wholeness of life and things, the divine beauty of the universe.
Corruption never has been compulsory; when the cities lie at the monster's feet there are left the mountains.
Humanity is the start of the race; I say Humanity is the mould to break away from, the crust to break through, the coal to break into fire, The atom to be split.
I have seen these ways of God: I know of no reason For fire and change and torture and the old returnings.
Justice and mercy/ Are human dreams, they do not concern the birds nor the fish nor eternal God.
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.
There is no reason for amazement: surely one always knew that cultures decay, and life's end is death.
Death's a fierce meadowlark: but to die having made / Something more equal to the centuries / Than muscle and bone, is mostly to shed weakness.
We have to live like people in a web of knives, we mustn't reach out our hands or we get them gashed.
Does it matter whether you hate yourself? At least love your eyes that can see, your mind that can hear the music, the thunder of the wings.
To the end of this age. Oh, a thousand yearsWill Hardly leach, ” he thought, “this dust of that fire.
Before there was any water there were tides of fire, both our tones flow from the older fountain.
In pleasant peace and security How suddenly the soul in a man begins to die He shall look up above the stalled oxen Envying the cruel falcon, And dig under the straw for a stone To bruise himself on.
... He is strong and pain is worse to the strong, incapacity is worse.
The tides are in our veins, we still mirror the stars, life is your child, but there is in meOlder and harder than life and more impartial, the eye that watched before there was an ocean.
I've changed my ways a little, I cannot nowRun with you in the evenings along the shore, Except in a kind of dream, and you, if you dream a moment, You see me there.
