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Robert Lowell
47 quotes
“It's terrible, Bob, to think that all I've suffered, and all the suffering I've caused, might have arisen from the lack of a little salt in my brain.”
Robert Lowell (1917–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Quoted in Robert Giroux's introduction to Lowell's Collected Prose (1987), pp. xiii–xiv
“The poets who most directly influenced me ... were Allen Tate, Elizabeth Bishop, and William Carlos Williams. An unlikely combination! ... but you can see that Bishop is a sort of bridge between Tate's formalism and Williams's informal art.”
Robert Lowell (1917–1977) first seen 1964 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Interview by Stanley Kunitz, "Talk with Robert Lowell", The New York Times (Oct. 4, 1964), p. BR34
“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 (1917–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1917–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The Lord survives the rainbow of His will.”
Robert Lowell (1917–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1917–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I will catch Christ with a greased worm.”
Robert Lowell (1917–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1917–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“This is the Black Widow, death.”
Robert Lowell (1917–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I saw the sky descending, black and white, Not blue, on Boston.”
Robert Lowell (1917–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The lights of science couldn't hold a candle to Mary risen—at one miraculous stroke, angel-wing'd, gorgeous as a jungle bird!”
Robert Lowell (1917–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Now Paris, our black classic, breaking up like killer kings on an Etruscan cup.”
Robert Lowell (1917–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You said: "We poets in our youth begin in sadness; thereof in the end come despondency and madness.”
Robert Lowell (1917–1977) first seen 1946 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: To Delmore Schwartz (Cambridge 1946)
“Who asks for me, the Shelley of my age, must lay his heart out for my bed and board.”
Robert Lowell (1917–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I doodle handlebar moustaches on the last Russian Czar”
Robert Lowell (1917–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Terrible that old life of decency without unseemly intimacy or quarrels, when the unemancipated woman still had her Freudian papá and maids!”
Robert Lowell (1917–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We are old-timers, each of us holds a locked razor.”
Robert Lowell (1917–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I keep no rank nor station. Cured, I am frizzled, stale and small.”
Robert Lowell (1917–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1917–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“These are the tranquilized 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 (1917–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1917–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Tamed by Miltown, we lie on Mother's bed.”
Robert Lowell (1917–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Oh my Petite, clearest of all God's creatures, still all air and nerve.”
Robert Lowell (1917–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Your old-fashioned tirade— loving, rapid, merciless— breaks like the Atlantic Ocean on my head.”
Robert Lowell (1917–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Gored by the climacteric of his want, he stalls above me like an elephant.”
Robert Lowell (1917–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1917–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“At forty-five, What next, what next? I meet my father, my age, still alive.”
Robert Lowell (1917–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1917–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We are like a lot of wild spiders crying together, but without tears.”
Robert Lowell (1917–1977) first seen 1961 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Fall 1961
“I am tired. Everyone's tired of my turmoil”
Robert Lowell (1917–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“But I suppose even God was born too late to trust the old religion— all those settings out that never left the ground, beginning in wisdom, dying in doubt.”
Robert Lowell (1917–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1917–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“On Boylston Street, a commercial photograph shows Hiroshima boiling.”
Robert Lowell (1917–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When I crouch to my television set, the drained faces of Negro school-children rise like balloons.”
Robert Lowell (1917–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The Aquarium is gone. Everywhere, giant finned cars nose forward like fish; a savage servility slides by on grease.”
Robert Lowell (1917–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“O to break loose, like the chinook salmon jumping and falling back, nosing up to the impossible stone and bone-crushing waterfall.”
Robert Lowell (1917–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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—until the end of time to police the earth, a ghost orbiting forever lost in our monotonous sublime.”
Robert Lowell (1917–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“After loving you so much, can I forget you for eternity, and have no other choice?”
Robert Lowell (1917–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Rome, if built at all, must be built in a day”
Robert Lowell (1917–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“No one like one's mother and father ever lived.”
Robert Lowell (1917–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1917–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“My eyes have seen what my hand did.”
Robert Lowell (1917–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If we see light at the end of the tunnel, It's the light of the oncoming train.”
Robert Lowell (1917–1977) first seen 1939 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Since 1939
“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 (1917–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It has taken me the time since you died to discover you are as human as I am... if I am.”
Robert Lowell (1917–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I— really I can do little, as little now as then, about the infernal fires— I cannot blow out a match.”
Robert Lowell (1917–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We are poor passing facts, warned by that to give each figure in the photograph his living name.”
Robert Lowell (1917–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source