Robert Hass Quotes - Page 4

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• In California we froze property taxes, school size increased, test scores declined, and there was a massive middle-class white flight to private schools. We're turning into Victorian England at a very rapid rate.

  Robert Hass

  School, Class, California

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

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• It was one of the great mass achievements of American civilization, and we did it because we thought if you were going to have a democratic form of government, people had to be able to read and understand complicated ideas on their own.

  Robert Hass

  Civilization, Ideas, Government

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

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• The ideal of universal literacy, in the West anyway, was first of all a Protestant idea - that everybody had to be able to read to save their soul. That idea got transposed into an idea of the importance of literacy for democratic citizenship.

  Robert Hass

  Ideas, Soul, Able

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

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• Everybody has a different idea of when those good old days were, but everyone is convinced that there was a time when literature really mattered and that it doesn't now. They also tend to believe that it really matters someplace else - in very improbable places often. Russia is someone's idea of a place where literature really counts.

  Robert Hass

  Believe, Ideas, Russia

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

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• I got interested in the question of literacy because writers are always moaning about why more people don't read books. They long for the good old days when people read serious novels.

  Robert Hass

  Book, Long, People

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

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• I was aware that a quarter of the children in the country are born in poverty, and that the condition of public schools in California was disastrous.

  Robert Hass

  Country, Children, School

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

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• I am talking about poetry. It's like that line from [John] Yeats: I go back to "where all the ladders start/ In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart."

  Robert Hass

  Heart, Talking, Ladders

  "Robert Hass" by Sarah Pollock, www.motherjones.com. March/April 1997.

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• There are instances: [Henry David] Thoreau read [John] Wordsworth, [John] Muir read Thoreau, Teddy Roosevelt read Muir, and you got national parks. It took a century for this to happen, for artistic values to percolate down to where honoring the relation of people's imagination to the land, or beauty, or to wild things, was issued in legislation.

  Robert Hass

  Land, Imagination, People

  "Robert Hass" by Sarah Pollock, www.motherjones.com. March/April 1997.

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• I think it's true to say that in 1973 I could read every book of poems that was published in a year, and I did.

  Robert Hass

  Book, Thinking, Years

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• Fiction writers have their own world, and poets have their own world, and literary criticism has sort of passed over into cultural studies in the university, and so on. They seem more disconnected from each other than they did when I first began to write.

  Robert Hass

  Writing, Criticism, Fiction

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• What Simone Weil said politics has meant all along, which means that you fight for 11 percent, 12 percent, 13 percent, that you avoid golden-age thinking and romantic melancholy and you just keep pushing.

  Robert Hass

  Mean, Fighting, Thinking

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

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• It's the same with this idea of a literate public, and also of a democracy in which people have access to and really read the best books. It turns out that even when you create this kind of environment, maybe only 10 percent of the people want to read those books.

  Robert Hass

  Book, Ideas, People

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

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• The thing I learned is that the work is getting done by people who dig in and work on a particular project: the people who spend 20 years sustaining a theater for black teenagers in Chicago; the people who reintroduce sticklebacks into Strawberry Creek in Berkeley and then wait patiently for the first egrets to show up.

  Robert Hass

  Teenager, Years, People

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

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• At some level, you have to be able to say, "This is my task." It's in small, local ways that you keep yourself alive and refresh ideas that are always going into dead abstraction.

  Robert Hass

  Ideas, Tasks, Alive

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

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• As an artist, you have the job of working out whatever is given you to work out.

  Robert Hass

  Jobs, Artist, Work Out

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

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• [Osip] Mandelstam, who wasn't a political thinker, loved the idea of the city-state. One of the emblems in his poetry of the politics he imagined, over and against the universalizing politics of [Carl] Marx, was the medieval city of Novgorod, which had in its center a public well where the water was free to everyone. That became for him a figure of justice.

  Robert Hass

  Cities, Ideas, Justice

  "Robert Hass" by Sarah Pollock, www.motherjones.com. March/April 1997.

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• The record of poetry in the 20th century isn't all that great anyway. Most of the poets who weren't fascists were Stalinists.

  Robert Hass

  Records, Poet, Century

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

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• [Osip] Mandelstam was killed by Stalinist forces.

  Robert Hass

  Force

  "Robert Hass" by Sarah Pollock, www.motherjones.com. March/April 1997.

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• [Cesar] Vallejo was at least metaphorically killed by fascist forces, in the sense that he wore himself out raising funds for the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War and got sick and died.

  Robert Hass

  War, Sick, Republican

  "Robert Hass" by Sarah Pollock, www.motherjones.com. March/April 1997.

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• Poetry, when it takes sides, when it proposes solutions, isn't any smarter than anybody else.

  Robert Hass

  Sides, Propose, Smarter

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

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• Milton was the first person who really experimented with putting politics into sonnets.

  Robert Hass

  Firsts, Milton, Sonnet

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• When I came into the job, funding for the humanities at the federal level was being drastically cut. This was the high tide of the new Republican Congress.

  Robert Hass

  Jobs, Cutting, Humanity

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

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• After Pope, in the beginning of Romanticism, people developed the idea that imagination rather than reason was a special form of knowledge and its best expression is through poetry. Therefore, poetry should not try to do the stuff that mere prose does: convey information or make arguments about ideas.

  Robert Hass

  Expression, Ideas, People

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• Our history doesn't look at our own violence, the violence in our own past, and we go out and repeat it someplace else.

  Robert Hass

  Past, Looks, Violence

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• Someone in Ireland asked me how many Republican poets there were in the U.S., and I thought maybe two. Maybe there are 10,000 poets, and maybe there are two Republicans among them.

  Robert Hass

  Two, Republican, Poet

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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