Robert Graves Quotes

A sullen pier-glass, cracked from side to side,
Scorns to present the face (as do new mirrors)
With a lying flush, but shows it melancholy
And pale, as faces grow that look in mirrors.

- The Pier-Glass

To be a poet is a condition rather than a profession.

A well chosen anthology is a complete dispensary of medicine for the more common mental disorders, and may be used as much for prevention as cure.

The child alone a poet is: Spring and Fairyland are his. Truth and Reason show but dim, And all's poetry with him.

I am an old man With my bones very brittle, Though I am a poor old man Worth very little, Yet I suck at my long pipe At peace in the sun, I do not fret nor much regret That my work is done.

On occasions of this sort it was, I must admit, very pleasurable to be a monarch: to be able to get important things done by smothering stupid opposition with a single authoritative word.

Riding on the shell and shot. He smites you down, he succours you, And where you seek him, he is not.

Cuinchy bred rats. They came up from the canal, fed on the plentiful corpses, and multiplied exceedingly. While I stayed here with the Welsh, a new officer joined the company... When he turned in that night, he heard a scuffling, shone his torch on the bed, and found two rats on his blanket tussling for the possession of a severed hand.

Love and honor. They are the two great things, and now they’re dimmed and blighted. Today, love is just sex and sentimentality. Love is really a recognition of truth, a recognition of another person’s integrity and truth in a way that is compatible with — that makes both of you light up when you recognize the quality in the other. That’s what love is. It’s a recognition of singularity… And love is giving and giving and giving … not looking for any return. Until you do that, you can’t love.

Love without hope, as when the young bird-catcher
Swept off his tall hat to the Squire's own daughter,
So let the imprisoned larks escape and fly
Singing about her head, as she rode by.

"The Blue Fly"

Five summer days, five summer nights,
The ignorant, loutish, giddy blue-fly
Hung without motion on the cling peach
Humming occasionally ‘O my love, my fair one!’
As in the canticles.

Magnified one thousand times, the insect
Looks farcically human; laugh if you will!
Bald head, stage fairy wings, blear eyes,
A caved-in chest, hairy black mandibles,
Long spindly thighs.

The crime was detected on the sixth day.
What then could be said or done? By anyone?
It would have been vindictive, mean, and what-not,
To swat that fly for being a blue-fly,
For debauch of a peach.

Is it fair either, to bring a microscope
To bear on the case, even in search of truth?
Nature, doubtless, has some compelling cause
To glut the carriers of her epidemics -
Nor did the peach complain.

As quick as boiled asparagus!

And what of home — how goes it, boys, While we die here in stench and noise?

The moon’s three phases of new, full, and old recalled the matriarch’s three phases of maiden, nymph (nubile woman), and crone.

Postumus was clever: he guessed that this would make Cato angry enough to forget himself. And Cato rose to the bait, shouting out with a string of old-fashioned curses that in the days of his ancestor, whose memory this stammering imp was insulting, woe betide any child who failed in reverence to his elders; for they dealt out discipline with a heavy hand in those days. Whereas in these degenerate times the leading men of Rome gave any ignorant oafish lout (this was for Postumus) or any feeble-minded decrepit-limbed little whippersnapper (this was for me) full permission— Postumus interrupted with a warning smile: "So I was right. The degenerate Augustus insults the great Censor by employing you in his degenerate family. I suppose you have told the Lady Livia just how you feel about things?"