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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
Mean
Along
Thinking
Percent
Weil
Fight
Melancholy
Politics
Pushing
Age
Romantic
Fighting
Golden
Means
Avoid
Keep
Meant

More quotes by Robert Hass

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If you read three books a day you couldn't read all the poetry that's being published.
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The problem with describing poets as legislators is that at that level of politics - politics as political invention - poets have no special skills and are not apt to.
Robert Hass
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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
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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.
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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
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Longing, we say, because desire is full of endless distances.
Robert Hass
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Poetry is a fireplace in summer or a fan in winter.
Robert Hass
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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.
Robert Hass
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Do poets have any insight into what's the right ratio? I doubt it, but I think that they can be awake to what the ends are.
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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.
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There are either poems about sex/love or God.
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The birds are silent in the woods. / Just wait: soon enough / You will be quiet too
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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.
Robert Hass
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My suspicion is that once you have literacy in place, the readership has not changed very much.
Robert Hass
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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
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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
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As I started reading about it, I saw that at the beginning of the 19th century, outside of New England - which was an unusually literate place - practically no one could read or write. And even in New England, the overall rate was only about 60 percent. That still means four out of 10 people couldn't put their name to a will.
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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.
Robert Hass
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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
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As poet laureate, I was asked to be a spokesman for literature. Then what I decided is I am a spokesman for this other imagination of community - not the one showing up in the market. Nobody was tending to the way we're imaginatively connected to each other.
Robert Hass