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| Robert Frost
A bank is a place where they lend you an umbrella in fair weather and ask for it back when it begins to rain. A civilized society is one which tolerates eccentricity to the point of doubtful sanity.A diplomat is a man who always remembers a woman's birthday but never remembers her age. A jury consists of twelve persons chosen to decide who has the better lawyer. A liberal is a man too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel. A mother takes twenty years to make a man of her boy, and another woman makes a fool of him in twenty minutes. A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness. A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom.A poem begins with a lump in the throat, a home-sickness or a love-sickness. It is a reaching-out toward expression; an effort to find fulfillment. A complete poem is one where the emotion has found its thought and the thought has found the words. A poet never takes notes. You never take notes in a love affair. A successful lawsuit is the one worn by a policeman. A true sonnet goes eight lines and then takes a turn for better or worse and goes six or eight lines more. And that has made all the difference. And were an epitaph to be my story I'd have a short one ready for my own. I would have written of me on my stone: I had a lover's quarrel with the world. Anything you do to the facts falsifies them, but anything the facts do to you ... transforms them into poetry. Being the boss anywhere is lonely. Being a female boss in a world of mostly men is especially so. By working faithfully eight hours a day, you may get to be a boss and work twelve hours a day. College is a refuge from hasty judgment. Create and stir other people to create. Don't ever take a fence down until you know why it was put up. Education doesn't change life much. It just lifts trouble to a higher plane of regard. Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self confidence. Everything worth saying has its own particular way, its own inevitable way, of being said. Forgive, O Lord, my little jokes on thee and I'll forgive thy great big joke on me. Half the world is composed of people who have something to say and can't, and the other half who have nothing to say and keep on saying it. Happiness makes up in height for what it lacks in length. Hell is a half-filled auditorium. I am a writer of books in retrospect. I talk in order to understand; I teach in order to learn. I cut my own hair. I got sick of barbers because they talk too much. And too much of their talk was about my hair coming out. I had a lovers quarrel with the world. I had to teach in the academy to make both ends meet, and then they did not meet. I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew. Writing a poem is discovering. I hold it to be the inalienable right of anybody to go to hell in his own way.I teach only when I have something I want to tell them. I told that boy from amherst this morning not to get the conquer-the-world-next-year-or-quit idea into his head. I write only when I can write – when I must write. I'm against a homogenized society, because I want the cream to rise. In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on. It's a funny thing that when a man hasn't anything on earth to worry about, he goes off and gets married. Love is an irresistible desire to be irresistibly desired. Most folks are poets. If they were not, some of us would have no one to read what we write. Perhaps a few of us specialize just a little more, that is all. No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. Nobody today knows how to read Homer and Virgil perfectly, because the people who spoke Homer's Greek and Virgil's Latin are as dead as the sound of their language. Occasionally a man comes along, who says, you can't tell me there is any poetry in the process of scratching a pig's back ! But I don't know. One aged man - one man - can't fill a house.Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat. Poets need not go to Niagara to write about the force of falling water. Some people think, that the chief aim of education is to find out what a man is fitted for. Quizzing shows that in its crudest form. Of course, that is not education's chief aim. You never quiz in good society. Talking is a hydrant in the yard and writing is a faucet upstairs in the house. Opening the first takes the pressure off the second. The best things and best people rise out of their separateness; I'm against a homogenized society because I want the cream to rise. The best way out is always through.The brain is a wonderful organ; it starts working the moment you get up in the morning, and does not stop until you get into the office. The chief reason for going to school is to get the impression fixed for life that there is a book side for everything. The father is always a Republican toward his son, and his mother's always a Democrat. The greatest thing in family life is to take a hint when a hint is intended-and not to take a hint when a hint isn't intended. The reason why worry kills more people than work is that more people worry than work. The truly educated can listen to any view without loosing their temper or self-confidence.The world is full of willing people; some willing to work, the rest willing to let them. Thinking isn’t agreeing or disagreeing. That’s voting. To be a poet is a condition, not a profession. Two such as you with such a master speed, cannot be parted nor be swept away, from one another once you are agreed, that life is only life forevermore, together wing to wing and oar to oar. We dance round in a ring and suppose, but the secret sits in the middle and knows. We have had so much of it (Nature Poetry) during the last century that there is almost a revulsion against it at the present time. When a man's young, he's an emotionalist. When he's old an intellectualist. Only about fifteen middle years are well-balanced. He should do his big works then. You can be a little ungrammatical if you come from the right part of the country. You can be a rank insider as well as a rank outsider. You have freedom when you’re easy in your harness. |
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