Quotes from Robert Hass

It is good sometimes for poetry to disenchant us.

The basis of art is change in the universe.

When you are composing a verse, let there not be a hair's breadth separating your mind from what you write. Quickly say what is in your mind; never hesitate a moment.

Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings, saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.

Poetry is a fireplace in summer or a fan in winter.

Sometimes from this hillside just after sunset The rim of the sky takes on a tinge Of the palest green, like the flesh of a cucumber When you peel it carefully.

We asked the captain what course of action he proposed to take toward a beast so large, terrifying, and unpredictable. He hesitated to answer, and then said judiciously: "I think I shall praise it."

It is like the keening sound the moon makes sometimes,/rising.

So few things we need to know. And the old wisdoms shudder in us and grow slack. Like renunciation. Like the melancholy beauty of giving it all up. Like walking steadfast in the rhythms, winter light and summer dark. And the time for cutting furrows and the dance

What is older than desire? the bare tree asked. Sorrow, said the sky. Sorrow is a river older than desire. — Robert Hass, from "February: Question" in "February Notebooks: The Rains," Summer Snow: New Poems (Ecco, 2020)

Don't imitate me; it's as boring as the two halves of a melon.

You begin to see that all of these things are connected: The kind of cuts that mean less environmental protection are also the kind of cuts that mean less musical education for the schools and that also mean more overcrowded schools.

There are moments when the body is as numinous as words, days that are the good flesh continuing. Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings, saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.

I would say Gary Snyder, who is from my part of the world as a poet and environmental thinker, will be read just as Henry Thoreau as John Muir will continue to be read.

One way to escape the universe in which everything is a kind of media cartoon is to write about the part of your life that doesn't feel like a cartoon, and how the cartoon comes into it.

I think that the job of poetry, its political job, is to refresh the idea of justice, which is going dead in us all the time.

There's very little solid research on readership, yet people make pronouncements about it all the time.

What we usually find is that when people think they have a new idea or approach something for the first time, it is actually a recurrence of a line of thinking explored in the past.

Writing is an incessant process of discovery.

In California in the early Spring, There are pale yellow mornings, when the mist burns slowly into day, The air stings like Autumn, clarifies like pain - Well, I have dreamed this coast myself.

When I was younger, I was so crazy about poetry that I didn't notice who was noticing. It seemed to me so tremendous and large.

The first book that really knocked me out was the 'Brothers Karamazov.' I read it when I was a senior in high school.

When I was in high school in the '50s you were supposed to be an Elvis Presley, a James Dean, a Marlon Brando or a Kingston Trio type in a button-down shirt headed for the fraternities at Stanford or Cal.

I got interested in the question of literacy because writers are always moaning about why more people don't read books.