Robert Hass Quotes

Quotes about:

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

  Robert Hass

  Writing, Poetry, Hell

  48 Copy quote

• Longing, we say, because desire is full of endless distances.

  Robert Hass

  Distance, Desire, Longing

  "Meditation at Lagunitas" l. 24 (1979)

  20 Copy quote

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

  Robert Hass

  Writing, Half, Hours

  20 Copy quote

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

  Robert Hass

  Soon Enough, Waiting, Bird

  13 Copy quote

• Haiku is an art that seems dedicated to making people pay attention to the preciousness and particularity of every moment of existence. I think that poetry can do that.

  Robert Hass

  Art, Thinking, People

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• The Earth forgives the previous year every year.

  Robert Hass

  Years, Forgiving, Earth

  10 Copy quote

• Poetry is a man arguing with himself; rhetoric is a man arguing with others.

  Robert Hass

  Men, Arguing, Rhetoric

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  5 Copy quote

• A word is elegy to what it signifies.

  Robert Hass

  Silence, Elegy

  "Meditation at Lagunitas" l. 11 (1979)

  20 Copy quote

• Repetition makes us feel secure and variation makes us feel free.

  Robert Hass

  Variation, Repetition, Feels

  Robert Hass (1984). “Twentieth century pleasures: prose on poetry”, Ecco Pr

  12 Copy quote

• 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

  Jobs, Thinking, Ideas

  Interview with Sarah Pollock, www.motherjones.com. March/April, 1997.

  4 Copy quote

• Writing is an incessant process of discovery.

  Robert Hass

  Writing, Discovery, Incessant

  "'What Light Can Do: Essays on Art, Imagination, and the Natural World,' by Robert Hass". Interview with Jeff Glor, www.cbsnews.com. August 21, 2012.

  11 Copy quote

• 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

  Ideas, Stories, Metaphor

  10 Copy quote

• Poetry is a fireplace in summer or a fan in winter.

  Robert Hass

  Summer, Winter, Fans

  17 Copy quote

• I suppose there's something to be said for the sheer reinforcement of our beliefs, but really I think poetry is more useful as disenchantment than enchantment.

  Robert Hass

  Thinking, Reinforcement, Enchantment

  Interview with Sarah Pollock, www.motherjones.com. March/April, 1997.

  5 Copy quote

• 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

  Running, Land, Water

  10 Copy quote

• 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

  Distance, Silly, Hands

  Robert Hass, “Meditation At Lagunitas”

  12 Copy quote

• I think that what art can do is refresh our sense of justice, wake us up to what we've taken for granted in the political realm, as in the other realms.

  Robert Hass

  Art, Taken, Thinking

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• I thought it was irrelevant to talk about what a wonderful thing poetry was if you didn't teach people to read.

  Robert Hass

  People, Wonderful, Teach

  Interview with Sarah Pollock, www.motherjones.com. March/April, 1997.

  4 Copy quote

• If you were making poetry out of convictions - trying to convince other people - you were in the territory of rhetoric, and that wasn't the territory of poetry. I think that's pretty smart. I think that it doesn't need to be altogether true, but that was my starting place.

  Robert Hass

  Smart, Thinking, People

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• Another problem about writing about politics in the "age of globalization" is that so much of the violence in the form of war and also in the forms of institutional violence - sweatshops, child labor, victimization of people economically - happens elsewhere and out of sight. And when we do know about it and need to witness it, it's always mediated by images of one kind or another, so you're kind of stuck trying to write about what it's like trying to be you living your life thinking about and experiencing this stuff in that way.

  Robert Hass

  Children, War, Writing

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  School, Trios, Buttons

  9 Copy quote

• 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

  Summer, Spring, Winter

  Robert Hass (1984). “Twentieth century pleasures: prose on poetry”, Ecco Pr

  9 Copy quote

• The poem that comes closest to saying what I think is the one in Human Wishes called "Rusia en 1931." This poem is about [Osip] Mandelstam, who was a great poet and an anti-Stalinist, and [Cesar] Vallejo, who was a great poet and a Stalinist.

  Robert Hass

  Thinking, Wish, Poet

  Interview with Sarah Pollock, www.motherjones.com. March/April, 1997.

  7 Copy quote

• My suspicion is that once you have literacy in place, the readership has not changed very much.

  Robert Hass

  Literacy, Changed, Suspicion

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• Pound described poetry as original research in language, and just as formal experiment in poetry has to try things and has to go too far, so does experiment with writing about politics in poetry and what the politics of poetry is.

  Robert Hass

  Writing, Trying, Doe

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

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