Robert Frost Quotes

Before I built a wall I'd ask to know What I was walling in or walling out, And to whom I was like to give offence. Something there is that doesn't love a wall, That wants it down.

My apple trees will never get across And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him. He only says, "Good fences make good neighbours."

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall, That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it, And spills the upper boulders in the sun; And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.

Something inspires the only cow of late To make no more of a wall than an open gate, And think no more of wall-builders than fools.

But he sent her Good-by, And said to be good, And wear her red hood, And look for skunk tracks In the snow with an ax — And do everything!

Her crop was a miscellany When all was said and done, A little bit of everything, A great deal of none.

"Don't let him cut my hand off— The doctor, when he comes. Don't let him, sister!" So. But the hand was gone already.

The buzz saw snarled and rattled in the yard And made dust and dropped stove-length sticks of wood, Sweet-scented stuff when the breeze drew across it.

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 has made all the difference.

A poem...begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness. It is a reaching-out toward expression; an effort to find fulfillment. A complete poem is one where an emotion finds the thought and the thought finds the words.

“Men work together,” I told him from the heart, “Whether they work together or apart.”

To warm the frozen swamp as best it could With the slow smokeless burning of decay.

I always have felt strange when we came home To the dark house after so long an absence, And the key rattled loudly into place Seemed to warn someone to be getting out At one door as we entered at another.

By good rights I ought not to have so much Put on me, but there seems no other way. Len says one steady pull more ought to do it. He says the best way out is always through. And I agree to that, or in so far As that I can see no way out but through — Leastways for me — and then they’ll be convinced.

Were he not gone, The woodchuck could say whether it's like his Long sleep, as I describe its coming on, Or just some human sleep.