Robert Lowell Quotes & Sayings

#1. I was overcome with an attack of pathological enthusiasm.

#2. All autumn, the chafe and jar
of nuclear war;
we have talked our extinction to death.
I swim like a minnow
behind my studio window.

Robert Lowell

#3. You trip and lance
Your finger at a crab. It strikes. You rub
It inch-meal to a bilge of shell. You dance
Child-crazy over tub and gunnel, grasping
Your pitchfork like a trident, poised to stab
The greasy eel-grass clasping and unclasping
The jellied iridescence of the crab.

Robert Lowell

#4. And blue-lung'd combers lumbered to the kill.

Robert Lowell

#5. It's a completely powerful and serious book, as good as anything in prose or poetry written by a 'beat' writer, and one of the most alive books written by any American for years. I don't see how it could be considered immoral.

Robert Lowell

#6. If we see light at the end of the tunnel, it the light of the oncoming train.

Robert Lowell

#7. September twenty-second, Sir, the bough cracks with unpicked apples, and at dawn the small-mouth bass breaks water, gorged with spawn.

Robert Lowell

#8. Poetry is not the record of an event: it is an event.

Robert Lowell

#9. How fine our distinctions when we cannot choose

Robert Lowell

#10. I myself am hell;
nobody's here

Robert Lowell

#11. Middle Age At forty-five, What next, what next? At every corner, I meet my Father, My age, still alive.

Robert Lowell

#12. Everywhere, giant finned cars nose forward like fish; a savage servility slides by on grease.

Robert Lowell

#13. Once fishing was a rabbit's foot
O wind blow cold, O wind blow hot

Robert Lowell

#14. No ease for the boy at the keyhole,
his telescope,
when the women's white bodies flashed
in the bathroom. Young, my eyes began to fail.

Nothing! No oil
for the eye, nothing to pour
on those waters or flames.
I am tired. Everyone's tired of my turmoil.

Robert Lowell

#15. I'm sure that writing isn't a craft, that is, something for which you learn the skills and go on turning out. It must come from some deep impulse, deep inspiration. That can't be taught, it can't be what you use in teaching.

Robert Lowell

#16. Then morning comes,
saying, "This was a night.

Robert Lowell

#17. What can be salvaged from your life? A pain
that gently darkens over heart and brain,
a fairy's touch, a cobweb's weight of pain,
now makes me tremble at your right to live.

Robert Lowell

#18. It is night,
And it is vanity, and age
Blackens the heart of Adam. Fear,
The yellow chirper, beaks its cage.

Robert Lowell

#19. Tockytock, tockytock
clumped our Alpine, Edwardian cuckoo clock,
slung with strangled, wooden game.

Robert Lowell

#20. Some morbidity in me attracts mosquitoes

Robert Lowell

#21. The barberry berry sticks on the small hedge,
cold slits the same crease in the finger,
the same thorn hurts. The leaf repeats the lesson.

Robert Lowell

#22. Those blessed structures, plot and rhyme
why are they no help to me now
I want to make
something imagined, not recalled?

Robert Lowell

#23. The black hardrubber bathtub stopper at the Parker house.

Robert Lowell

#24. The slick bare tar, the same suburban station.

Robert Lowell

#25. We are all old-timers,
each of us holds a locked razor.

Robert Lowell

#26. But sometimes everything I write
with the threadbare art of my eye
seems a snapshot

Robert Lowell

#27. We wished our two souls
might return like gulls
to the rock. In the end,
the water was too cold for us.

Robert Lowell

#28. One universe, one body ... in this urn
the animal night sweats of the spirit burn

Robert Lowell

#29. The dead season when wolves live off the wind.

Robert Lowell

#30. Her German language made my arteries harden-
I've no annuity for the play we blew.
I chartered an aluminum canoe,
I had her six times in the English Garden.

Robert Lowell

#31. Animals
fattened for your for your arena suffered less
than you in dying-yours the lawlessness
of something simple that has lost its law,
my namesake, and the last Caligula.

Robert Lowell

#32. Then the dry road dust rises to whiten
the fatigued elm leaves-
the nineteenth century, tired of children, is gone.
They're all gone into a world of light; the farm's my own.

Robert Lowell

#33. In the end, every hypochondriac is his own prophet.

Robert Lowell

#34. Talking about the past is like a cat's trying to explain climbing down a ladder,

Robert Lowell

#35. History has to live with what was here,
clutching and close to fumbling all we had -
it is so dull and gruesome how we die,
unlike writing, life never finishes.

Robert Lowell

#36. This
is the departure strip,
the dream-road. Whoever built it
left numbers, words and arrows.
He had to leave in a hurry.

Robert Lowell

#37. F we see light at the end of the tunnel, It's the light of the oncoming train.

Robert Lowell

#38. In Boston serpents whistle at the cold.

Robert Lowell

#39. If youth is a defect, it is one that we outgrow too soon.

Robert Lowell

#40. Wallowing in this bloody sty,
I cast for fish that pleased my eye

Robert Lowell

#41. Life begins to happen.
My hoppped up husband drops his home disputes,
and hits the streets to cruise for prostitutes

Robert Lowell

#42. It's the light of the oncoming train.

Robert Lowell

#43. It's not a visitation by angels, but a weakening in the blood
a magical orange grove in a nightmare

Robert Lowell

#44. Sometimes nothing is so solid to me as writing - I suppose that's what a vocation means - at times a torment, a bad conscience, but all in all, purpose and direction.

Robert Lowell

#45. Flabby, bald, lobotomized,
he drifted in a sheepish calm,
where no agonizing reappraisal
jarred his concentration on the electric chair-
hanging like an oasis on his air
of lost connections ...

Robert Lowell

#46. The light at the end of the tunnel is just the light of an oncoming train.

Robert Lowell

#47. I want to apologize for plaguing you with so many telephone calls last November and December. When the 'enthusiasm' is coming on me it is accompanied by a feverish reaching out to my friends. After its over I wince and wither.

Robert Lowell

#48. The Lord survives the rainbow of His will.

Robert Lowell

#49. The bones cry for the blood of the white whale,
The fat flukes arch and whack about its ears,
The death-lance churns into the sanctuary, tears
The gun-blue swingle, heaving like a flail,
And hacks the coiling life out ...

Robert Lowell

#50. In the end, there is no end.

Robert Lowell

#51. The scythers, Time and Death,
Helmed locusts, move upon the tree of breath

Robert Lowell

#52. Pity the planet, all joy gone
from this sweet volcanic cone;
peace to our children when they fall
in small war on the heel of small
war
until the end of time
to police the earth, a ghost
orbiting forever lost
in our monotonous sublime

Robert Lowell