Quotes from Robert Frost

The figure a poem makes. It begins in delight and ends in wisdom... in a clarification of life - not necessarily a great clarification, such as sects and cults are founded on, but in a momentary stay against confusion.

No, this is no beginning. Then an end? End is a gloomy word.

Start with a big fat lump in your throat. Start with a profound sense of wrong, a deep homesickness, a crazy lovesickness, and run with it. If you imagine less, less will be what you undoubtedly deserve. Do what you love. And don't stop until you get what you love.

There are no two things as important to us in life and in art as being threatened and being saved. What are ideals of form for if we aren't going to be made to fear for them? All our ingenuity is lavished on getting into danger legitimately so that we may be genuinely rescued.

Too long I've owed you this apology For the apparently unmeaning sorrow You were afflicted with in those old days. But it was of the essence of the trial You shouldn't understand it at the time.

A Time to Talk When a friend calls to me from the road And slows his horse to a meaning walk, I don't stand still and look around On all the hills I haven't hoed, And shout from where I am, What is it? No, not as there is a time to talk. I thrust my hoe in the mellow ground, Blade-end up and five feet tall, And plod: I go up to the stone wall For a friendly visit.

If one by one we counted people out For the least sin, it wouldn't take us long To get so we had no one left to live with. For to be social is to be forgiving.

I had A Lover's Quarrel With The World.

He moves in darkness as it seems to me Not of woods only and the shade of trees.

Fragmentary Blue Why make so much of fragmentary blue In here and there a bird, or butterfly, Or flower, or wearing-stone, or open eye, When heaven presents in sheets the solid hue? Since earth is earth, perhaps, not heaven (as yet)-- Though some savants make earth include the sky; And blue so far above us comes so high, It only gives our wish for blue a whet.

If it is with outer seriousness, it must be with inner humor. If it is with outer humor, it must be with inner seriousness. Neither one alone without the other under it will do.

They are that that talks of going But never gets away.

Heaven gives its glimpses only to those Not in position to look too close.

He said the dead had souls, but when I asked him How that could be - I thought the dead were souls, He broke my trance. Don't that make you suspicious That there's something the dead are keeping back? Yes, there's something the dead are keeping back.

And lonely as it is that loneliness Will be more lonely ere it will be less-- A blanker whiteness of benighted snow With no expression, nothing to express. They cannot scare me with their empty spaces Between stars--on stars where no human race is. I have it in me so much nearer home To scare myself with my own desert places.

What is this? This life? Our sitting here by lanternlight together Amid the wreckage of a former home? You won't deny the lantern isn't new. The stove is not, and you are not to me, Nor I to you.

Door in the Dark: In going from room to room in the dark, I reached out blindly to save my face, But neglected, however lightly, to lace My fingers and close my arms in an arc. A slim door got in past my guard, And hit me a blow in the head so hard I had my native simile jarred. So people and things don't pair any more With what they used to pair with before.

Di hutan, kulihat dua cabang jalan terbentang. Kuambil yang jarang dilalui orang. Dan itulah yang membuat segala perbedaan

We saw the risk we took in doing good, But dared not spare to do the best we could

I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew. Writing a poem is discovering.

I shall be telling this with a sigh somewhere ages and ages hence. Two roads diverged in a wood, and I, I took the one less traveled by, and that had made all the difference.

And the dead leaves lie huddled and still, No longer blown hither and thither; The last lone aster is gone; The flowers of the witch hazel wither; The heart is still aching to seek, But the feet question 'Whither?' Ah, when to the heart of man Was it ever less than a treason To go with the drift of things, To yield with a grace to reason, And bow and accept the end Of a love or a season?

I often say of George Washington that he was one of the few in the whole history of the world who was not carried away by power.

The objective idea is all I ever cared about. Most of my ideas occur in verse... To be too subjective with what an artist has managed to make objective is to come on him presumptuously and render ungraceful what he in pain of his life had faith he had made graceful.