Quotes from Robert Lowell

They fly by like a train window:

What can be salvaged from your life? A pain that gently darkens over heart and brain, a fairy's touch, a cobweb's weight of pain, now makes me tremble at your right to live.

You lie in my insomniac arms, as if you drank sleep like coffee.

Past fifty, we learn with surprise and a sense of suicidal absolution that what we intended and failed could never have happened— and must be done better.

I grow too merry, when I stand in my nakedness to dress.

Things last, but sometimes for days here only children seem fit to handle children, and there is no utility or inspiration in the wind smashing without direction. The fresh paint on the captains' houses hides softer wood.

Who can help us from our nothing to the all, we aging downstream faster than a scepter can check?

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

In the end, there is no end.

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

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

Some morbidity in me attracts mosquitoes

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

In the end, every hypochondriac is his own prophet.

how fine our distinctions when we cannot choose

The dead season when wolves live off the wind.

What we love we are.

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. But where The wind is westerly, Where gnarled November makes the spiders fly Into the apparitions of the sky, They purpose nothing but their ease and die Urgently beating east to sunrise and the sea;

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

We are poor passing facts. warned by that to give each figure in the photograph his living name.

One universe, one body...in this urn the animal night sweats of the spirit burn

The Lord survives the rainbow of His will.

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.

Her German language made my arteries harden- I've no annuity for the play we blew. I chartered an aluminum canoe, I had her six times in the English Garden.