Robinson Jeffers Quotes

The ghosts . . . try to remember the sunlight. Light has died out of their skies.

While this America settles in the mould of its vulgarity,
heavily thickening to empire, I
And protest, only a bubble in the molten mass, pops
and sighs out, and the mass hardens,

I sadly smiling remember that the flower fades to make
fruit, the fruit rots to make earth.
Qut of the mother; and through the spring exultances,
ripeness and decadence; and home to the mother.

You making haste haste on decay: not blameworthy; life
is good, be it stubbornly long or suddenly
A mortal splendor: meteors are not needed less than
mountains: shine, perishing republic.

But for my children. I would have them keep their dis-
tance from the thickening center; corruption.
Never has been compulsory, when the cities lie at the
monster’s feet there are left the mountajns.

And boys, be in nothing so moderate as in love of man,
a clever servant, insufferable master.
There is the trap that catches noblest spirits, that caught
-–they say — God, when he walked on earth.

Before there was any water there were tides of fire, both our tones flow from the older fountain.

This is my last worst pain,
the bitter enlightenment that buys peace.

What is this thing called life? I believe
That the earth and the stars too, and the whole glittering universe, and rocks on the mountains have life,
Only we do not call it so — I speak of the life
That oxidizes fats and proteins and carbo-
Hydrates to live on, and from that chemical energy
Makes pleasure and pain, wonder, love, adoration, hatred and terror: how do these things grow
From a chemical reaction?
I think they were here already, I think the rocks
And the earth and the other planets, and the stars and the galaxies
have their various consciousness, all things are conscious;
But the nerves of an animal, the nerves and brain
Bring it to focus; the nerves and brain are like a burning-glass
To concentrate the heat and make it catch fire:
It seems to us martyrs hotter than the blazing hearth
From which it came. So we scream and laugh, clamorous animals
Born howling to die groaning: the old stones in the dooryard
Prefer silence; but those and all things have their own awareness,
As the cells of a man have; they feel and feed and influence each other, each unto all,
Like the cells of a man's body making one being,
They make one being, one consciousness, one life, one God.

Old violence is not too old to beget new values.

...poetry cannot speak without remembering the turns of the sun and moon, and the rhythm of the ocean, and the recurrence of human generations, the returning waves of life and death.

Meteors are not needed less than mountains: shine, perishing republic.

I would burn my right hand in a slow fire
To change the future . . . I should do foolishly. The beauty of modern
Man is not in the persons but in the
Disastrous rhythm, the heavy and mobile masses, the dance of the
Dream-led masses down the dark mountain.

We must uncenter our minds from ourselves; We must unhmanize our views a little, and become confident As the rock and ocean that we were made from.

Then what is the answer? — Not to be deluded by dreams. To know that great civilizations have broken down into violence, and their tyrants come, many times before. When open violence appears, to avoid it with honor or choose the least ugly faction; these evils are essential. To keep one's own integrity, be merciful and uncorrupted and not wish for evil; and not be duped By dreams of universal justice or happiness. These dreams will not be fulfilled.

for a poem
Needs multitude, multitudes of thoughts, all fierce, all flesh-eaters, musically clamorous
Bright hawks that hover and dart headlong, and ungainly
Gray hungers fledged with desire of transgression, salt slimed beaks, from the sharp
Rock-shores of the world and the secret waters.

We have to live like people in a web of knives, we mustn't reach out our hands or we get them gashed.

"The old woman sits on a bench before the door and quarrels
With her meagre pale demoralized daughter.
Once when I passed I found her alone, laughing in the sun
And saying that when she was first married
She lived in the old farmhouse up Garapatas Canyon.
(It is empty now, the roof has fallen
But the log walls hang on the stone foundation; the redwoods
Have all been cut down, the oaks are standing;
The place is now more solitary than ever before.)
"When I was nursing my second baby
My husband found a day-old fawn hid in a fern-brake
And brought it; I put its mouth to the breast
Rather than let it starve, I had milk enough for three babies.
Hey how it sucked, the little nuzzler,
Digging its little hoofs like quills into my stomach.
I had more joy from that than from the others."
Her face is deformed with age, furrowed like a bad road
With market-wagons, mean cares and decay.
She is thrown up to the surface of things, a cell of dry skin
Soon to be shed from the earth's old eye-brows,
I see that once in her spring she lived in the streaming arteries,
The stir of the world, the music of the mountain."

Never blame the man: his hard-pressed
Ancestors formed him: the other anthropoid apes were safe
In the great southern rain-forest and hardly changed
In a million years: but the race of man was made
By shock and agony…
… a wound was made in the brain
When life became too hard, and has never healed.
It is there that they learned trembling religion and blood-
sacrifice,
It is there that they learned to butcher beasts and to slaughter
men,
And hate the world.