Top 100 Robert Graves Quotes
#1. There's no money in poetry, but then there's no poetry in money either. - Robert Graves
Robert Graves
#2. I've read a lot of war writing, even World War I writing, the British war poetry of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves's memoir "Goodbye to All That," and a civilian memoir "Testament of Youth" by Vera Brittain .
George Packer
#3. James Parkinson. George Huntington. Robert Graves. John Down. Now this Lou Gehrig fellow of mine. How did men come to monopolize disease names too?
Khaled Hosseini
#4. 'Undertones of War' by Edmund Blunden seems to get less attention than the memoirs of Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves, but it is a great book.
Pat Barker
#5. Eros aimed one of his arrows at Medea, and drove it into her heart, up to the feathers.
Robert Graves
#7. The child alone a poet is:
Spring and Fairyland are his.
Robert Graves
#8. Love at first sight'some say misnaming
Discovery of twinned helplessness
Against the huge tug of procreation.
But friendship at first sight? This also
Catches fiercely at the surprised heart
So that the cheek blanches then blushes.
Robert Graves
#9. Before an attack, the platoon pools all its available cash and the survivors divide it up afterwards. Those who are killed can't complain, the wounded would have given far more than that to escape as they have, and the unwounded regard the money as a consolation prize for still being here.
Robert Graves
#10. Though philosophers like to define poetry as irrational fancy, for us it is practical, humorous, reasonable way of being ourselves.
Robert Graves
#12. Since the age of 15 poetry has been my ruling passion and I have never intentionally undertaken any task or formed any relationship that seemed inconsistent with poetic principles; which has sometimes won me the reputation of an eccentric.
Robert Graves
#13. Take your delight in momentariness, Walk between dark and dark a shining space With the grave 's narrowness, though not its peace.
Robert Graves
#14. She tells her love while half asleep,
In the dark hours,
With half-words whispered low:
As Earth stirs in her winter sleep
And puts out grass and flowers
Despite the snow,
Despite the falling snow.
Robert Graves
#15. But godhead is, after all, a matter of fact, not a matter of opinion: if a man is generally worshipped as a god then he is a god. And if a god ceases to be worshipped he is nothing.
Robert Graves
#16. True poetry (inspired by the Muse and her prime symbol, the moon) even today is a survival, or intuitive re-creation, of the ancient Goddess-worship.
Robert Graves
#17. On occasions of this sort it was, I must admit, very pleasurable to be a monarch: to be able to get important things done by smothering stupid opposition with a single authoritative word.
Robert Graves
#18. I was last in Rome in AD 540 when it was full of Goths and their heavy horses. It has changed a great deal since then.
Robert Graves
#20. Marriage, like money, is still with us; and, like money, progressively devalued.
Robert Graves
#21. As you are woman, so be lovely: As you are lovely, so be various, Merciful as constant, constant as various, So be mine, as I yours for ever.
Robert Graves
#22. There should be two main objectives in ordinary prose writing: to convey a message and to include in it nothing that will distract the reader's attention or check his habitual pace of reading - he should feel that he is seated at ease in a taxi, not riding a temperamental horse through traffic.
Robert Graves
#23. That the crowd always likes a holiday is a common saying, but when the whole year becomes one long holiday, and nobody has time for attending to his business, and pleasure becomes compulsory, then it is a different matter.
Robert Graves
#24. Those that can't beat the ass, beat the saddle.
Robert Graves
#25. Religious fanaticism is the most dangerous form of insanity.
Robert Graves
#26. Hardly one soldier in a hundred was inspired by religious feeling of even the crudest kind. It would have been difficult to remain religious in the trenches even if one had survived the irreligion of the training battalion at home.
Robert Graves
#27. Entrance and exit wounds are silvered clean, The track aches only when the rain reminds. The one-legged man forgets his leg of wood, The one-armed man his jointed wooden arm. The blinded man sees with his ears and hands As much or more than once with both his eyes.
Robert Graves
#28. The conversation was like the sort one has in dreams - mad but interesting.
Robert Graves
#29. Any honest housewife would sort them out,/ Having a nose for fish, an eye for apples.
Robert Graves
#30. There's no money in poetry, but there's no poetry in money, either.
Robert Graves
#31. Patriotism, in the trenches, was too remote a sentiment, and at once rejected as fit only for civilians, or prisoners. A new arrival who talked patriotism would soon be told to cut it out.
Robert Graves
#32. There are secrets I will take to the grave and others I'd feel safer having cremated.
Robert Breault
#33. Truth-loving Persians do not dwell upon The trivial skirmish fought near Marathon.
Robert Graves
#34. So when I'm killed, don't wait for me, Walking the dim corridor; In Heaven or Hell, don't wait for me, Or you must wait for evermore. You'll find me buried, living-dead In these verses that you've read.
Robert Graves
#35. But give thanks, at least, that you still have Frost's poems; and when you feel the need of solitude, retreat to the companionship of moon, water, hills and trees. Retreat, he reminds us, should not be confused with escape. And take these poems along for good luck!
Robert Graves
#36. Poet, never chase the dream. Laugh yourself and turn away. Mask your hunger, let it seem Small matter if he come or stay; But when he nestles in your hand at last, Close up your fingers tight and hold him fast.
Robert Graves
#37. Lest when I am gone you may be at a loss for an epitaph for me, let me give you one - He Fed Fevers.
Robert James Graves
#38. The butterfly, a cabbage-white, (His honest idiocy of flight) Will never now, it is too late, Master the art of flying straight.
Robert Graves
#40. Prose books are the show dogs I breed and sell to support my cat
Robert Graves
#41. England looked strange to us returned soldiers. We could not understand the war-madness that ran wild everywhere, looking for a pseudo-military outlet. The civilians talked a foreign language. I found serious conversation with my parents all but impossible.
Robert Graves
#42. The gas-cylinders had by this time been put into position on the front line. A special order came round imposing severe penalties on anyone who used any word but "accessory" in speaking of the gas. This was to keep it secret, but the French civilians knew all about the scheme long before this.
Robert Graves
#43. There's a cool web of language winds us in, Retreat from too much joy or too much fear: We grow sea-green at last and coldly die In brininess and volubility.
Robert Graves
#44. Originally marriage meant the sale of a woman by one man to another; now most women sell themselves though they have no intention of delivering the goods listed in the bill of sale.
Robert Graves
#45. This seems to me a philosophical question, and therefore irrelevant, question. A poet's destiny is to love.
Robert Graves
#46. The function of poetry is religious invocation of the muse; its use is the experience of mixed exaltation and horror that her presence excites.
Robert Graves
#47. When I'm killed, don't think of me Buried there in Cambrin Wood, Nor as in Zion think of me With the Intolerable Good. And there's one thing that I know well, I'm damned if I'll be damned to Hell!
Robert Graves
#49. Blows the wind to-day, and the sun and the rain are flying,
Blows the wind on the moors to-day and now,
Where about the graves of the martyrs the whaups are crying,
My heart remembers how!
Robert Louis Stevenson
#51. Anthropologists are a connecting link between poets and scientists; though their field-work among primitive peoples has often made them forget the language of science.
Robert Graves
#52. I was thinking, So, I'm Emperor, am I? What nonsense! But at least I'll be able to make people read my books now.
Robert Graves
#53. Augustus ruled the world, but Livia ruled Augustus.
Robert Graves
#54. there are two different ways of writing history: one is to persuade men to virtue and the other is to compel men to truth.
Robert Graves
#55. One gets to the heart of the matter by a series of experiences in the same pattern, but in different colors.
Robert Graves
#56. He found a formula for drawing comic rabbits:
This formula for drawing comic rabbits paid.
Till in the end he could not change the tragic habits
This formula for drawing comic rabbits made.
Robert Graves
#57. Lovers to-day and for all time Preserve the meaning of my rhyme: Love is not kindly nor yet grim But does to you as you to him.
Robert Graves
#58. In love as in sport, the amateur status must be strictly maintained.
Robert Graves
#59. Fact is not truth, but a poet who willfully defies fact cannot achieve truth.
Robert Graves
#60. I revise the manuscript till I can't read it any longer, then I get somebody to type it. Then I revise the typing. Then it's retyped again. Then there's a third typing, which is the final one. Nothing should then remain that offends the eye.
Robert Graves
#61. I believe that every English poet should read the English classics, master the rules of grammar before he attempts to bend or break them, travel abroad, experience the horrors of sordid passion, and - if he is lucky enough - know the love of an honest woman.
Robert Graves
#62. Peleus lived to a good age and survived his famous son Achilles, an initiate of the Centaur Horse fraternity, who was killed at the siege of Troy.
Robert Graves
#63. Claudius, you're luckier than you realize. Guard your appointment jealously. Don't let anyone usurp it."
"What do you mean, girl?"
"I mean that people don't kill their butts. They are cruel to them, they frighten them, they rob them, but they don't kill them.
Robert Graves
#64. I don't really feel my poems are mine at all. I didn't create them out of nothing. I owe them to my relations with other people.
Robert Graves
#65. I made no more protests. What was the use of struggling against fate
Robert Graves
#66. Because the world is in a sick condition and we are all somehow infected, against our will, even if we think we are whole in mind and soul and body.
Robert Graves
#67. Nor had I any illusions about Algernon Charles Swinburne, who often used to stop my perambulator when he met it on Nurses' Walk, at the edge of Wimbledon Common, and pat me on the head and kiss me: he was an inveterate pram-stopper and patter and kisser.
Robert Graves
#68. There's no money in poetry. Then again, there's no poetry in money either.
Robert Graves
#69. As was the custom in such cases, the pear tree was charged with murder and sentenced to be uprooted and burned.
Robert Graves
#71. No honest theologian therefore can deny that his acceptance of Jesus as Christ logically binds every Christian to a belief in reincarnation - in Elias case (who was later John the Baptist) at least.
Robert Graves
#72. My understanding of zombie movies is people rising from the dead, from their graves, stuff like that, and walking very slowly.
Robert Carlyle
#73. Nine-tenths of English poetic literature is the result either of vulgar careerism or of a poet trying to keep his hand in. Most poets are dead by their late twenties.
Robert Graves
#74. You mean that people who continue virtuous in an old-fashioned way must inevitably suffer in times like these?
Robert Graves
#75. Kill if you must, but never hate: Man is but grass and hate is blight, The sun will scorch you soon or late, Die wholesome then, since you must fight
Robert Graves
#76. If I were a girl, I'd despair. The supply of good women far exceeds that of the men who deserve them.
Robert Graves
#77. You know how it is when one talks of liberty. Everything seems beautifully simple. One expects every gate to open and every wall to fall flat.
Robert Graves
#78. My plans were vague. I talked liberty to many of my friends and, you know how it is, when one talks liberty everything seems beautifully simple. One expects all gates to open and all walls to fall flat and all voices to shout for joy.
Robert Graves
#79. I am supposed to be an utter fool and the more I read the more of a fool they think me.
Robert Graves
#80. But [I] had sworn on the very day of my demobilization never to be under anyone's orders for the rest of my life. Somehow I must live by writing.
Robert Graves
#81. For words of rapture groping, they"Never such love," swore "ever before was!"
Robert Graves
#82. Most men - it is my experience - are neither virtuous nor scoundrels, good-hearted nor bad-hearted. They are a little of one thing and a little of the other and nothing for any length of time: ignoble mediocrities.
Robert Graves
#83. If there's no money in poetry, neither is there poetry in money
Robert Graves
#84. A song? What laughter or what song
Can this house remember?
Do flowers and butterflies
Belong to a blind December?
Robert Graves
#85. I think,' said Arete with warmth, 'that to go to sleep on a problem which one is too lazy to solve is a most foolish procedure.
Robert Graves
#86. He was always boasting of his ancestors, as stupid people do who are aware that they have done nothing themselves to boast about.
Robert Graves
#87. Poetry is no more a narcotic than a stimulant; it is a universal bittersweet mixture for all possible household emergencies and its action varies accordingly as it is taken in a wineglass or a tablespoon, inhaled, gargled or rubbed on the chest by hard fingers covered with rings.
Robert Graves
#88. No poem is worth anything unless it starts from a poetic trance, out of which you can be wakened by interruption as from a dream. In fact, it is the same thing.
Robert Graves
#89. English poetic education should, really, not begin with The Canterbury Tales, not with the Odyssey, not even with Genesis, but with Song of Amergin.
Robert Graves
#90. Let all the poison that lurks in the mud, hatch out.
Robert Graves
#91. Every English poet should master the rules of grammar before he attempts to bend or break them.
Robert Graves
#92. From the very commencement the student should set out to witness the progress and effects of sickness and ought to persevere in the daily observation of disease during the whole period of his studies.
Robert James Graves
#93. All forms of literature are dangerous; but in none is the danger more acute than in historical fiction...
John Julius Norwich
#94. Time is not the stable moving-staircase that prosemen have for centuries pretended it to be, but an unaccountable wibble-wobble
Robert Graves
#95. Shakespeare was of us, Milton was of us, Burns, Shelley, were with us. They watch from their graves!
Robert Browning
#97. My thesis is that the language of poetic myth anciently current in the Mediterranean and Northern Europe was a magical language bound up with popular religious ceremonies in honour of the Moon-goddess, or Muse,
Robert Graves
#98. When plotting revenge, you should dig two graves - one for your enemy, and the other for yourself
Nathan Robert Brown
#99. The award of a pure gold medal for poetry would flatter the recipient unduly: no poem ever attains such carat purity.
Robert Graves
#100. The poet's first rule must be never to bore his readers; and his best way of keeping this rule is never to bore himself-which, of course, means to write only when he has something urgent to say.
Robert Graves
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