Quotes from Robert Frost

Two such as you with such a master speed Cannot be parted nor be swept away

You can't trust God to be unmerciful. There you have the beginning of all wisdom.

It should be of the pleasure of a poem itself to tell how it can. The figure a poem makes. It begins in delight and ends in wisdom. The figure is the same for love.

There is one thing more exasperating than a wife who can cook and won't, and that's a wife who can't cook and will.

Being the boss anywhere is lonely. Being a female boss in a world of mostly men is especially so.

More than once I should have lost my soul to radicalism if it had been the originality it was mistaken for by its young converts.

A mother takes twenty years to make a man of her boy, and another woman makes a fool of him in twenty minutes.

Earth would soon Be uninhabitable as the moon. What for that matter had it ever been? Who advised man to come and live therein?

One aged man - one man - can't fill a house.

No memory of having starred atones for later disregard, or keeps the end from being hard.

Despite our fears and worries, and they are very real to all of us, life continues — it goes on. In these three words I can sum up everything I have learned in my 80 years about life — it goes on.

It begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness. It is never a thought to begin with. It is at its best when it is a tantalizing vagueness. It finds its thought and succeeds, or doesn't find it and comes to nothing.

A complete poem is one where an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found the words. Some poems took years to find their words.

Poetry is what gets lost in translation.

I'd as soon write free verse as play tennis with the net down.

If it is a wild tune, it is a poem... Theme alone can steady us down. Just as the first mystery was how a poem could have a tune in such a straightness as meter, so the second mystery is how a poem can have wildness and at the same time a subject that shall be fulfilled. It should be of the pleasure of the poem itself to tell how it can. The figure a poem makes. It begins in delight and ends in wisdom. The figure is the same as for love.

There is no love. There's only love of men and women, love Of children, love of friends, of men, of God: Divine love, human love, parental love, Roughly discriminated for the rough.

Nothing can make injustice just but mercy.

You don't have to deserve your mother's love. You have to deserve your father's. He's more particular. One's a Republican, one's a Democrat. The father is always a Republican toward his son, and his mother's always a Democrat.

A champion of the workingman has never been known to die of overwork.

It looked as if a night of dark intent was coming, and not only a night, an age. Someone had better be prepared for rage.

I never dared be radical when young For fear it would make me conservative when old.

I alone of English writers have consciously set myself to make music out of what I may call the sound of sense.

Any work of art must first of all tell a story.