Quotes About Hass

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

Robert Hass

#2. The market doesn't make communities. Markets make networks of self-interested individuals, and they work as long as there's more than enough to go around.

Robert Hass

#3. It is good sometimes for poetry to disenchant us.

Robert Hass

#4. 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.

Robert Hass

#5. 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.

Robert Hass

#6. Ah, love, this is fear. This is fear and syllables
and the beginnings of beauty.

Robert Hass

#7. Don't worry, spiders,
I keep house
casually.

Robert Hass

#8. August is dust here. Drought
stuns the road,
but juice gathers in the berries.

Robert Hass

#9. According to what the
IDF says to its soldiers. I
don't know if this is
what the IDF says to the
media.

Amira Hass

#10. When I was in high school in the '50s you were supposed to be an Elvis Presley, a James Dean, a Marlon Brando or a Kingston Trio type in a button-down shirt headed for the fraternities at Stanford or Cal.

Robert Hass

#11. The love of books
is for children
who glimpse in them
a life to come, but
I have come
to that life and
feel uneasy
with the love of books.
This is my life,
time islanded
in poems of dwindled time.

Robert Hass

#12. The whole difference between the nineteenth century and the twentieth century could be summed up in two words, graveyard and cemetery.

Robert Hass

#13. It is essential for leaders of complex projects to understand the power of teams.

Kathleen B. Hass

#14. The Earth forgives the previous year every year.

Robert Hass

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

Robert Hass

#16. An ideology that divides the world into those who are worth more and those who are worth less, into superior and inferior beings, does not have to reach the dimensions of the German genocide to be wrong.

Amira Hass

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

Robert Hass

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

Robert Hass

#19. The must have it now mentality, was man's first step into the gorging of his natural home.

Lotte Hass

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

Robert Hass

#21. 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.

Robert Hass

#22. The awful longing in his eyes, are changed forever
On their rocky waste of island by their imagination
Of his imagination of the song they didn't sing.

Robert Hass

#23. 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.

Robert Hass

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

Robert Hass

#25. I would say Gary Snyder, who is from my part of the world as a poet and environmental thinker, will be read just as Henry Thoreau as John Muir will continue to be read.

Robert Hass

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

Robert Hass

#27. Throwing stones is the birthright and duty of anyone subject to foreign rule. Throwing stones is an action as well as a metaphor of resistance.

Amira Hass

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

Robert Hass

#29. Not to make too much of a claim for poetry, but this is a question that goes to the moral heart of the business of any art: 'How do you see the world, and what right do you have to see the world in the way that you do?'

Robert Hass

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

Robert Hass

#31. 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.

Robert Hass

#32. You begin to see that all of these things are connected: The kind of cuts that mean less environmental protection are also the kind of cuts that mean less musical education for the schools and that also mean more overcrowded schools.

Robert Hass

#33. It is like the keening sound the moon makes sometimes,/rising.

Robert Hass

#34. We asked the captain what course
of action he proposed to take toward
a beast so large, terrifying, and
unpredictable. He hesitated to
answer, and then said judiciously:
"I think I shall praise it."

Robert Hass

#35. 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.

Robert Hass

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

Robert Hass

#37. When I was younger, I was so crazy about poetry that I didn't notice who was noticing. It seemed to me so tremendous and large.

Robert Hass

#38. Reading is a gymnasium for the imagination where people can work out, get ready for the shocks of existence. For me, the intimate teachers have not only taught me how to make things, they have represented some qualities of mind and mindfulness that I would like to have.

Robert Hass

#39. 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.

Robert Hass

#40. As poet laureate, I was asked to be a spokesman for literature.

Robert Hass

#41. Writing is an incessant process of discovery.

Robert Hass

#42. Images are not quite ideas, they are stiller than that, with less implication outside themselves. And they are not myth, they do not have the explanatory power; they are nearer to pure story. Nor are they always metaphors; they do not say this is that, they say this is.

Robert Hass

#43. I teach a lecture course on American poetry to as many as 150 students. For a lot of them, it's their only elective, so this is their one shot. They'll take the Russian Novel or American Poetry, so I want to give them the high points, the inescapable poets.

Robert Hass

#44. What would you do if you were me? she said.
If I were you-you, or if I were you-me?
If you were me-me.
If I were you-you, he said, I'd do exactly
what you're doing.

Robert Hass

#45. The thing people forget when they are looking for solutions is there is nothing final in history.

Amira Hass

#46. I got interested in the question of literacy because writers are always moaning about why more people don't read books.

Robert Hass

#47. What journalism is really about-it's to monitor power and the centres of power.

Amira Hass

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

Robert Hass

#49. The basis of art is change in the universe.

Robert Hass

#50. Sometimes it is good and sometimes
it is dangerous like the ignorance
of particulars, but our words are clear
and our movements give off light.

Robert Hass

#51. The Vietnam War and the Iraq war, in different ways, both made me feel like I could not not address them. I'm very doubtful about the usefulness of poetry to do that.

Robert Hass

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

Robert Hass

#53. So few things we need to know.
And the old wisdoms shudder in us and grow slack.
Like renunciation. Like the melancholy beauty
of giving it all up. Like walking steadfast
in the rhythms, winter light and summer dark.
And the time for cutting furrows and the dance

Robert Hass

#54. 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.

Robert Hass

#55. When you are composing a verse, let there not be a hair's breadth separating your mind from what you write. Quickly say what is in your mind; never hesitate a moment.

Robert Hass