Edwin Arlington Robinson Quotes

I cannot find my way: there is no star
In all the shrouded heavens anywhere

Ah, when shall come love's courage to be strong!
Tell me, O Lord
tell me, O Lord, how long
Are we to keep Christ writhing on the cross!

She knows as well as anyone that pity, having played, soon tires.

Two kinds of gratitude: The sudden kind we feel for what we take; the larger kind we feel for what we give.

Pity is like a knife, sometimes, and it may pierce one who employs it more shrewdly than the victim it would save.

Language that tells us, through a more or less emotional reaction,
something that can not be said.

For through it all
above, beyond it all
I know the far-sent message of the years,
I feel the coming glory of the Light.

Shake the tree of life itself and bring down fruits unheard of.

I have been reading the Old Testament, a most bloodthirsty and perilous book for the young. Jehovah is beyond doubt the worst character in fiction.

I am living on hope and faith ... a pretty good diet when the mind will receive them.

The stillness of October gold
Went out like beauty from a face.

Where's the need of singing now?

No matter what we are, and what we sing, Time finds a withered leaf in every laurel

I don't say what God is, but a name That somehow answers us when we are driven To feel and think how little we have to do With what we are.

Do you hear the children singing?

He knows much of what men paint themselves would blister in the light of what they are.

Youth sees too far to see how near it is To seeing farther.

To some will come a time when change itself is beauty, if not heaven.

And thus we all are nighing The truth we fear to know: Death will end our crying For friends that come and go.

For when a woman is left too much alone, sooner or later she begins to think;- And no man knows what then she may discover.

Were it not for love, Poor life would be a ship not worth launching.

I shall have more to say when I am dead.

This morning I deleted the hyphen from "hell-bound" and made it one word; this afternoon I redivided it and restored the hyphen.

And we who delve in beauty's lore
Know all that we have known before
Of what inexorable cause
Makes Time so vicious in his reaping.

Life is the game that must be played

Seizing the swift logic of a woman,
Curse God and die.

Love must have wings to fly away from love, and to fly back again.

Friends: people who borrow my books and set wet glasses on them.

I wonder more and more just where I may have come out if I had never seen Harvard Square.

I mean you last as long as lies.

Poets and kings are but the clerks of Time,
Tiering the same dull webs of discontent,
Clipping the same sad alnage of the years.