Robert Hass Quotes & Sayings

It's hell writing and it's hell not writing. The only tolerable state is having just written. — Robert Hass

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

It is like the keening sound the moon makes sometimes,/rising. — Robert Hass

Poetry is a fireplace in summer or a fan in winter. — Robert Hass

After a while I understood that, talking this way, everything dissolves: justice, pine, hair, woman, you and I. There was a woman I made love to and I remembered how, holding her small shoulders in my hands sometimes, I felt a violent wonder at her presence like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river with its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat, muddy places where we caught the little orange-silver fish called pumpkinseed. It hardly had to do with her. Longing, we say, because desire is full of endless distances. — Robert Hass

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

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

Writing is an incessant process of discovery. — Robert Hass

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

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

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

Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings, saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry. — Robert Hass

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

Nostalgia locates desire in the past where it suffers no active conflict and can be yearned toward pleasantly. — Robert Hass

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

It is good sometimes for poetry to disenchant us. — Robert Hass

The basis of art is change in the universe. — Robert Hass

August is dust here. Drought
stuns the road,
but juice gathers in the berries. — Robert Hass

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

Repetition makes us feel secure and variation makes us feel free. — Robert Hass

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

When everything broken is broken,
and everything dead is dead,
and the hero has looked into the mirror with complete contempt,
and the heroine has studied her face and its defects
remorselessly, and the pain they thought might,
as a token of their earnestness, release them from themselves
has lost its novelty and not released them,
and they have begun to think, kindly and distantly,
watching the others go about their days
likes and dislikes, reasons, habits, fears
that self-love is the one weedy stalk
of every human blossoming, and understood,
therefore, why they had been, all their lives,
in such a fury to defend it, and that no one
except some almost inconceivable saint in his pool
of poverty and silence - can escape this violent, automatic
life's companion ever, maybe then, ordinary light,
faint music under things, a hovering like grace appears. — Robert Hass

But usually not. Usually she thinks of the path to his house, whether deer had eaten the tops of the fiddleheads, why they don't eat the peppermint saprophytes sprouting along the creek; or she visualizes the approach to the cabin, its large windows, the fuchsias in front of it where Anna's hummingbirds always hover with dirty green plumage and jeweled throats. Sometimes she thinks about her dream, the one in which her mother wakes up with no hands. The cabin smells of oil paint, but also of pine. The painter's touch is sexual and not sexual, as she herself is ... When the memory of that time came to her, it was touched by strangeness because it formed no pattern with the other events in her life. It lay in her memory like one piece of broken tile, salmon-coloured or the deep green of wet leaves, beautiful in itself but unusable in the design she was making — Robert Hass

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

The birds are silent in the woods. / Just wait: soon enough / You will be quiet too — Robert Hass

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

All the new thinking is about loss. In this it resembles all the old thinking — Robert Hass

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

Ah, love, this is fear. This is fear and syllables
and the beginnings of beauty. — Robert Hass

'Paradise Lost' was printed in an edition of no more than 1,500 copies and transformed the English language. Took a while. Wordsworth had new ideas about nature: Thoreau read Wordsworth, Muir read Thoreau, Teddy Roosevelt read Muir, and we got a lot of national parks. Took a century. What poetry gives us is an archive, the fullest existent archive of what human beings have thought and felt by the kind of artists who loved language in a way that allowed them to labor over how you make a music of words to render experience exactly and fully. — Robert Hass

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

Justice is the well water of the city of/ Novgorod, black and sweet — Robert Hass

The Earth forgives the previous year every year. — Robert Hass

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

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

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

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

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

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

Don't worry, spiders,
I keep house
casually. — Robert Hass

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

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

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

As poet laureate, I was asked to be a spokesman for literature. — Robert Hass

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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