Robert Graves Quotes

Soldiers really are an extraordinary race of men, as tough as shield-leather, as superstitious as Egyptians and as sentimental as Sabine grandmothers.

Now I begin to know at last, These nights when I sit down to rhyme, The form and measure of that vast God we call Poetry, he who stoops And leaps me through his paper hoops A little higher every time.

Call it a good marriage -
For no one ever questioned
Her warmth, his masculinity,
Their interlocking views;
Except one stray graphologist
Who frowned in speculation
At her h's and her s's,
His p's and w's.

Though few would still subscribe
To the monogamic axiom
That strife below the hip-bones
Need not estrange the heart,
Call it a good marriage:
More drew those two together,
Despite a lack of children,
Than pulled them apart.

Call it a good marriage:
They never fought in public,
They acted circumspectly
And faced the world with pride;
Thus the hazards of their love-bed
Were none of our damned business -
Till as jurymen we sat on
Two deaths by suicide.

England looked strange to us returned soldiers. We could not understand the war madness that ran about everywhere, looking for a pseudo-military outlet. The civilians talked a foreign language; and it was newspaper language.

I protested: "But all this is childish. Is there a war on here, or isn't there?" "The Royal Welch don't recognize it socially," he answered.

The difference between you and her
(whom I to you did once prefer)
Is clear enough to settle:
She like a diamond shone, but you
Shine like an early drop of dew
Poised on a red rose petal.

The dew-drop carries in its eye
Mountain and forest, sea and sky,
With every change of weather;
Contrariwise, a diamond splits
The prospect into idle bits
That none can piece together.

Where is good English to be found? Not among those who might be expected to write well professionally. Schoolmasters seldom write well: it is difficult for any teacher to avoid either pomposity or, in the effort not to be pompous, a jocular conversational looseness. The clergy suffer from much the same occupational disability: they can seldom decide whether to use "the language of the market-place" or Biblical rhetoric. Men of letters usually feel impelled to cultivate an individual style — less because they feel sure of themselves as individuals than because they wish to carve a niche for themselves in literature; and nowadays an individual style usually means merely a peculiar range of inaccuracies, ambiguities, logical weaknesses and stylistic extravagancies. Trained journalists use a flat, over-simplified style, based on a study of what sells a paper and what does not, which is inadequate for most literary purposes.

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

To know only one thing well is to have a barbaric mind: civilization implies the graceful relation of all varieties of experience to a central human system of thought.

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

About this business of being a gentleman: I paid so heavily for the fourteen years of my gentleman’s education that I feel entitled, now and then, to get some sort of return.

To use the majesty of law for revenging any petty act of private spite is to make a public confession of weakness, cowardice and an ignoble spirit.

This is a story of what I was, not what I am.

Down on his knees he sinks, the stiff-necked King, Stoops and kneels and grovels, chin to the mud. Out from his changed heart flutter on startled wing The fancy birds of his Pride, Honour, Kinglihood. He crawls, he grunts, he is beast-like, frogs and snails His diet, and grass, and water with hand for cup. He herds with brutes that have hooves and horns and tails, He roars in his anger, he scratches, he looks not up.

I don't answer questions about conjectures.