Edwin Arlington Robinson Quotes & Sayings

I wonder more and more just where I may have come out if I had never seen Harvard Square. — Edwin Arlington Robinson

And we who delve in beauty's lore
Know all that we have known before
Of what inexorable cause
Makes Time so vicious in his reaping. — Edwin Arlington Robinson

I mean you last as long as lies. — Edwin Arlington Robinson

He knows much of what men paint themselves would blister in the light of what they are. — Edwin Arlington Robinson

And there was no Camelot now -- now that no Queen was there, all white and gold, under an oaktree with another sunlight sifting itself in silence on her glory through the dark leaves above her where she sat, smiling at what she feared, and fearing least what most there was to fear.
— Edwin Arlington Robinson

Life is the game that must be played — Edwin Arlington Robinson

Alone, he saw the slanting waves roll in,
Each to its impotent annihilation
In a long wash of foam, until the sound
Become for him a warning and a torture,
Like a malign reproof reiterating
In vain its cold and only sound of doom. — Edwin Arlington Robinson

Language that tells us, through a more or less emotional reaction,
something that can not be said. — Edwin Arlington Robinson

The typical entrepreneur is no longer the bold and tireless man of Marshall, or the sly and rapacious Moneybags of Marx, but a mass of inert shareholders, indistinguishable from rentiers, who employ salaried managers to run their concerns. — Edwin Arlington Robinson

And thus we all are nighing The truth we fear to know: Death will end our crying For friends that come and go. — Edwin Arlington Robinson

No matter what we are, and what we sing, Time finds a withered leaf in every laurel — Edwin Arlington Robinson

This morning I deleted the hyphen from "hell-bound" and made it one word; this afternoon I redivided it and restored the hyphen. — Edwin Arlington Robinson

Love must have wings to fly away from love, and to fly back again. — Edwin Arlington Robinson

For when a woman is left too much alone, sooner or later she begins to think;- And no man knows what then she may discover. — Edwin Arlington Robinson

Seizing the swift logic of a woman,
Curse God and die. — Edwin Arlington Robinson

Dark hills at evening in the west,
Where sunset hovers like a sound
Of golden horns that sang to rest
Old bones of warriors underground,
Far now from all the bannered ways
Where flash the legions of the sun,
You fade--as if the last of days
Were fading, and all wars were done. — Edwin Arlington Robinson

I don't say what God is, but a name That somehow answers us when we are driven To feel and think how little we have to do With what we are. — Edwin Arlington Robinson

Whenever Richard Cory went down town,
We people on the pavement looked at him:
He was a gentleman from sole to crown,
Clean favored, imperially slim.
And he was always quietly arrayed,
And he was always human when he talked;
But still he fluttered pulses when he said,
'Good-morning,' and he glittered when he walked.
And he was rich
yes, richer than a king
And admirably schooled in every grace:
In fine, we thought that he was everything
To make us wish that we were in his place.
So on we worked, and waited for the light,
And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;
And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,
Went home and put a bullet through his head. — Edwin Arlington Robinson

Two kinds of gratitude: The sudden kind we feel for what we take; the larger kind we feel for what we give. — Edwin Arlington Robinson

Were it not for love, Poor life would be a ship not worth launching. — Edwin Arlington Robinson

I am living on hope and faith ... a pretty good diet when the mind will receive them. — Edwin Arlington Robinson

She fears him, and will always ask
What fated her to choose him;
She meets in his engaging mask
All reasons to refuse him;
But what she meets and what she fears
Are less than are the downward years
Drawn slowly to the foamless weirs
Of age, were she to lose him. — Edwin Arlington Robinson

I cannot find my way: there is no star
In all the shrouded heavens anywhere — Edwin Arlington Robinson

Shake the tree of life itself and bring down fruits unheard of. — Edwin Arlington Robinson

To some will come a time when change itself is beauty, if not heaven. — Edwin Arlington Robinson

Where's the need of singing now? — Edwin Arlington Robinson

Your Dollar is your only Word, / The wrath of it your only fear. / You build it altars tall enough / To make you see, but your are blind; / You cannot leave it long enough / To look before you or behind. — Edwin Arlington Robinson

Youth sees too far to see how near it is To seeing farther. — Edwin Arlington Robinson

It is impossible to understand the economic system in which we are living if we try to interpret it as a rational scheme.It has to be understood as an awkward phase in a continuing process of historical development. — Edwin Arlington Robinson

Pity is like a knife, sometimes, and it may pierce one who employs it more shrewdly than the victim it would save. — Edwin Arlington Robinson

For through it all
above, beyond it all
I know the far-sent message of the years,
I feel the coming glory of the Light. — Edwin Arlington Robinson

I shall have more to say when I am dead. — Edwin Arlington Robinson

The stillness of October gold
Went out like beauty from a face. — Edwin Arlington Robinson

Are we no greater than the noise we make Along one blind atomic pilgrimage Whereon by crass chance billeted we go Because our brains and bones and cartilage Will have it so? — Edwin Arlington Robinson

Out of a grave I come to tell you this, -
Out of grave I come to quench the kiss
That flames upon your forehead with a glow
That blinds you to the way that you must go.
Yes, there is yet one way to where she is, -
Bitter, but one that faith can never miss.
Out of a grave I come to tell you this -
To tell you this. — Edwin Arlington Robinson

Do you hear the children singing? — Edwin Arlington Robinson

I have been reading the Old Testament, a most bloodthirsty and perilous book for the young. Jehovah is beyond doubt the worst character in fiction. — Edwin Arlington Robinson

She knows as well as anyone that pity, having played, soon tires. — Edwin Arlington Robinson

Poets and kings are but the clerks of Time,
Tiering the same dull webs of discontent,
Clipping the same sad alnage of the years. — Edwin Arlington Robinson

Ah, when shall come love's courage to be strong!
Tell me, O Lord
tell me, O Lord, how long
Are we to keep Christ writhing on the cross! — Edwin Arlington Robinson

The world is not a prison house, but a kind of spiritual kindergarten where millions of of bewildered infants are trying to spell God with the wrong blocks. — Edwin Arlington Robinson

Friends: people who borrow my books and set wet glasses on them. — Edwin Arlington Robinson