Quote

History has to live with what was here, clutching and close to fumbling all we had - it is so dull and gruesome how we die, unlike writing, life never finishes.

Robert Lowell

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Robert Lowell
Age: 60 †
Born: 1917
Born: March 1
Died: 1977
Died: September 12
Peace Activist
Poet
Translator
Writer
Boston
Massachusetts
Robert Traill Spence Lowell IV
Close
Dies
History
Fumbling
Live
Gruesome
Writing
Clutching
Never
Finishes
Life
Unlike
Dull

More quotes by Robert Lowell

Image
the scythers, Time and Death, Helmed locusts, move upon the tree of breath
Robert Lowell
Image
It is night, And it is vanity, and age Blackens the heart of Adam. Fear, The yellow chirper, beaks its cage.
Robert Lowell
Image
Pity the planet, all joy gone from this sweet volcanic cone peace to our children when they fall in small war on the heel of small war--until the end of time to police the earth, a ghost orbiting forever lost in our monotonous sublime
Robert Lowell
Image
September twenty-second, Sir, the bough cracks with unpicked apples, and at dawn the small-mouth bass breaks water, gorged with spawn.
Robert Lowell
Image
The Lord survives the rainbow of His will.
Robert Lowell
Image
I want to apologize for plaguing you with so many telephone calls last November and December. When the 'enthusiasm' is coming on me it is accompanied by a feverish reaching out to my friends. After its over I wince and wither.
Robert Lowell
Image
I saw the spiders marching through the air, Swimming from tree to tree that mildewed day In latter August when the hay Came creaking to the barn.
Robert Lowell
Image
Their monument sticks like a fishbone in the city's throat.
Robert Lowell
Image
In the end, there is no end.
Robert Lowell
Image
We feel the machine slipping from our hands As if someone else were steering If we see light at the end of the tunnel, It's the light of the oncoming train.
Robert Lowell
Image
I will catch Christ with a greased worm, And when the Prince of Darkness stalks My bloodstream to its Stygian term . . . On water the Man-Fisher walks.
Robert Lowell
Image
The world is absolutely out of control now and is not going to be saved by any reason or unreason.
Robert Lowell
Image
It's the light of the oncoming train.
Robert Lowell
Image
I saw the spiders marching through the air, Swimming from tree to tree that mildewed day In latter August when the hay Came creaking to the barn. But where The wind is westerly, Where gnarled November makes the spiders fly Into the apparitions of the sky, They purpose nothing but their ease and die Urgently beating east to sunrise and the sea.
Robert Lowell
Image
I was overcome with an attack of pathological enthusiasm.
Robert Lowell
Image
We are all old-timers, each of us holds a locked razor.
Robert Lowell
Image
But sometimes everything I write with the threadbare art of my eye seems a snapshot
Robert Lowell
Image
Those blessed structures, plot and rhyme-- why are they no help to me now I want to make something imagined, not recalled?
Robert Lowell
Image
And blue-lung'd combers lumbered to the kill.
Robert Lowell
Image
Everywhere, giant finned cars nose forward like fish a savage servility slides by on grease.
Robert Lowell