Quote

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

Robert Hass

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Robert Hass
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: March 1
Literary Critic
Poet
Teacher
Translator
University Teacher
Writer
San Francisco County
California
Robert L. Hass
Suffers
Nostalgia
Active
Conflict
Toward
Suffering
Locates
Desire
Yearned
Past
Pleasantly

More quotes by Robert Hass

Image
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
Image
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
Image
Take the time to write. You can do your life's work in half an hour a day.
Robert Hass
Image
Milton was the first person who really experimented with putting politics into sonnets.
Robert Hass
Image
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
Image
Where politics is concerned, I think poets have to be pragmatists, philosophical pragmatists.
Robert Hass
Image
If you're imaginatively responsible to the place you live in, you understand the watershed.
Robert Hass
Image
Poetry had in the hands of various people become a place for inconvenient knowledge insofar as it was a place for knowledge at all. But it was a place where you could talk about other kinds of experience than the official version.
Robert Hass
Image
[Osip] Mandelstam was killed by Stalinist forces.
Robert Hass
Image
There are either poems about sex/love or God.
Robert Hass
Image
Writing is an incessant process of discovery.
Robert Hass
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Prose gets divided up into fiction and nonfiction and short fiction and long fiction and autobiographical nonfiction and so on. Poetry can do any of those things except with the added definition of intensified formal pressure.
Robert Hass
Image
The birds are silent in the woods. / Just wait: soon enough / You will be quiet too
Robert Hass
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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