Quotes from Edwin Arlington Robinson

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

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

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.

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

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!

I shall have more to say when I am dead.

The world is a kind of spiritual kindergarten where millions of bewildered infants are trying to spell "God" with the wrong blocks.

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

Miniver Cheevy, child of scorn,Grew lean while he assailed the seasons;He wept that he was ever born,And he had reasons.

He glittered when he walked.

Miniver Cheevy, born too late,Scratched his head and kept on thinking;Miniver coughed and called it fate,And kept on drinking.

There is ruin and decayIn the House on the Hill:They are all gone away,There is nothing more to say.

Here where the wind is always north-northeastAnd children learn to walk on frozen toes.

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

I would have rid the earth of himOnce, in my pride.I never knew the worth of himUntil he died.

I shall have more to say when I am dead.

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

The world is not a prison house, but a kind of spiritual kindergarten where millions of of bewildered infants are trying to spell God with the wrong blocks.

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

Life is the game that must be played

And there was no Camelot now -- now that no Queen was there, all white and gold, under an oaktree with another sunlight sifting itself in silence on her glory through the dark leaves above her where she sat, smiling at what she feared, and fearing least what most there was to fear.

Dark hills at evening in the west, Where sunset hovers like a sound Of golden horns that sang to rest Old bones of warriors underground, Far now from all the bannered ways Where flash the legions of the sun, You fade--as if the last of days Were fading, and all wars were done.

Alone, he saw the slanting waves roll in, Each to its impotent annihilation In a long wash of foam, until the sound Become for him a warning and a torture, Like a malign reproof reiterating In vain its cold and only sound of doom.

She fears him, and will always ask What fated her to choose him; She meets in his engaging mask All reasons to refuse him; But what she meets and what she fears Are less than are the downward years Drawn slowly to the foamless weirs Of age, were she to lose him.