Robert Lowell Quotations

If we see light at the end of the tunnel, it the light of the oncoming train.

It is almost never possible to do pre-licensing studies that are large enough to find very rare events with great certainty, ... We have to find the correct balance between safety and making new preventive tools -- such as vaccines -- at a cost our society can afford.

I saw the spiders marching through the air,Swimming from tree to tree that mildewed dayIn latter August when the hayCame creaking to the barn.

Is getting well ever an art/ Or art a way to get well.

The monument sticks like a fishbone / in the city's throat.

The light at the end of the tunnel is just the light of an oncoming train.

It's the light of the oncoming train.

It's a completely powerful and serious book, as good as anything in prose or poetry written by a 'beat' writer, and one of the most alive books written by any American for years. I don't see how it could be considered immoral.

And blue-lung'd combers lumbered to the kill.

Talking about the past is like a cat's trying to explain climbing down a ladder,

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.

But sometimes everything I write with the threadbare art of my eye seems a snapshot

Wallowing in this bloody sty, I cast for fish that pleased my eye

the scythers, Time and Death, Helmed locusts, move upon the tree of breath

September twenty-second, Sir, the bough cracks with unpicked apples, and at dawn the small-mouth bass breaks water, gorged with spawn.

I myself am hell; nobody's here

Once fishing was a rabbit's foot-- O wind blow cold, O wind blow hot

Life begins to happen. My hoppped up husband drops his home disputes, and hits the streets to cruise for prostitutes

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.

Poetry is not the record of an event: it is an event.

Pity the planet, all joy gone from this sweet volcanic cone

We are all old-timers, each of us holds a locked razor.

The Lord survives the rainbow of His will.

In the end, every hypochondriac is his own prophet.

I was overcome with an attack of pathological enthusiasm.

Their monument sticks like a fishbone in the city's throat.

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.

Middle Age At forty-five, What next, what next? At every corner, I meet my Father, My age, still alive.

What can the dove of Jesus give You now but wisdom, exile? Stand and live, The dove has brought an olive branch to eat.

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.

Most poetry is very formal, but when a modern poet is formal he gets more attention for it than old poets did.

Sometimes nothing is so solid to me as writing - I suppose that's what a vocation means - at times a torment, a bad conscience, but all in all, purpose and direction.

I'm sure that writing isn't a craft, that is, something for which you learn the skills and go on turning out. It must come from some deep impulse, deep inspiration. That can't be taught, it can't be what you use in teaching.

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

It is night, And it is vanity, and age Blackens the heart of Adam. Fear, The yellow chirper, beaks its cage.

Everywhere, giant finned cars nose forward like fish; a savage servility slides by on grease.

Those blessed structures, plot and rhyme-- why are they no help to me now I want to make something imagined, not recalled?

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.

The world is absolutely out of control now and is not going to be saved by any reason or unreason.

In the end, there is no end.

If youth is a defect, it is one we outgrow too soon.