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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

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Robert Hass
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: March 1
Literary Critic
Poet
Teacher
Translator
University Teacher
Writer
San Francisco County
California
Robert L. Hass
Means
Avoid
Keep
Meant
Mean
Along
Thinking
Percent
Weil
Fight
Melancholy
Politics
Pushing
Age
Romantic
Fighting
Golden

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Writing is an incessant process of discovery.
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Nostalgia locates desire in the past where it suffers no active conflict and can be yearned toward pleasantly.
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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.
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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.
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Longing, we say, because desire is full of endless distances.
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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.
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If you ask me if I have this or that principle, tell me what its consequences are, and then I'll tell you whether I have that principle or not.
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Poetry, when it takes sides, when it proposes solutions, isn't any smarter than anybody else.
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My first book was published when I was thirty-two, so I think it was basically finished when I was thirty or thirty-one. And so then you think, Well, what have you failed to do? And my answer to myself was almost everything.
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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.
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It's hell writing and it's hell not writing. The only tolerable state is having just written.
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Milton was the first person who really experimented with putting politics into sonnets.
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I think one percent of the population attended college when Wallace Stevens and Robert Frost and Gertrude Stein were at Harvard. Now I think forty percent of Americans have some college education. That's an astronomical change.
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There are either poems about sex/love or God.
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The first book that really knocked me out was the 'Brothers Karamazov.' I read it when I was a senior in high school.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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One way to escape the universe in which everything is a kind of media cartoon is to write about the part of your life that doesn't feel like a cartoon, and how the cartoon comes into it.
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I teach a lecture course on American poetry to as many as 150 students. For a lot of them, its their only elective, so this is their one shot. Theyll take the Russian Novel or American Poetry, so I want to give them the high points, the inescapable poets.
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