Robert Frost Quotes - Page 2

One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.
Robert Frost
Fire and IceSome say the world will end in fire,Some say in ice.From what I’ve tasted of desireI hold with those who favor fire.But if it had to perish twice,I think I know enough of hateTo say that for destruction iceIs also greatAnd would suffice.
Robert Frost
I hold with those who favor fire.But if it had to perish twice,I think I know enough of hateTo know that for destruction iceIs also great
Robert Frost
There should be more or less of a jumble in your head or on your note paper after the first time and even after the second. Much that you will think of in connection will come to nothing and be wasted. But some of it ought to go together under one idea. That idea is the thing to write on and write into the title at the head of your paper… One idea and a few subordinate ideas — [the trick is] to have those happen to you as you read and catch them — not let them escape you… The sidelong glance is what you depend on. You look at your author but you keep the tail of your eye on what is happening over and above your author in your own mind and nature.
Robert Frost
By faithfully working eight hours a day you may eventually get to be boss and work twelve hours a day.
Robert Frost
An idea is a feat of association, and the height of it is a good metaphor.
Robert Frost
I hold it to be the inalienable right of anybody to go to hell in his own way.
Robert Frost
The ArmfulFor every parcel I stoop down to seizeI lose some other off my arms and knees,And the whole pile is slipping, bottles, buns,Extremes too hard to comprehend at. onceYet nothing I should care to leave behind.With all I have to hold with hand and mindAnd heart, if need be, I will do my best.To keep their building balanced at my breast.I crouch down to prevent them as they fall;Then sit down in the middle of them all.I had to drop the armful in the roadAnd try to stack them in a better load.
Robert Frost
It looked as if a night of dark intent was coming, and not only a night, an age. Someone had better be prepared for rage...
Robert Frost
The farm is a base of operations–a stronghold. You can withdraw into yourself there. Solitude for reflection is an essential ingredient in self-development. I think a person has to be withdrawn into himself to gather inspiration so that he is somebody when he comes out again among folks–when he “comes to market’ with himself. He learns that he’s got to be almost wastefully alone.
Robert Frost
Thinking is not to agree or disagree. That's voting.
Robert Frost
So was I once myself a swinger of birches.And so I dream of going back to be.
Robert Frost
More than once I should have lost my soul to radicalism if it had been the originality it was mistaken for by its young converts.
Robert Frost
I have wished a bird would fly away,And not sing by my house all day;Have clapped my hands at him from the doorWhen it seemed as if I could bear no more.The fault must partly have been in me.The bird was not to blame for his keys.And of course there must be something wrongIn waiting to silence any song.
Robert Frost
Lovers, forget your love,And list the love of these,She a window flower,And he a winter breeze.
Robert Frost
My sorrow, when she's here with me, thinks these dark days of autumn rain are beautiful as days can be; she loves the bare, the withered tree; she walks the sodden pasture lane.
Robert Frost
The best way out is always through.
Robert Frost
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, And sorry I could not travel both And be one traveler, long I stood And looked down one as far as I could To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Robert Frost
The mind-is not the heart.I may yet live, as I know others live,To wish in vain to let go with the mind-Of cares, at night, to sleep; but nothing tells meThat I need learn to let go with the heart.
Robert Frost
When the spent sun throws up its rays on cloudAnd goes down burning into the gulf below,No voice in nature is heard to cry aloudAt what has happened. Birds, at least must knowIt is the change to darkness in the sky.Murmuring something quiet in her breast,One bird begins to close a faded eye;Or overtaken too far from his nest,Hurrying low above the grove, some waifSwoops just in time to his remembered tree.At most he thinks or twitters softly, 'Safe!Now let the night be dark for all of me.Let the night be too dark for me to seeInto the future. Let what will be, be.
Robert Frost
I have been one acquainted with the night.I have walked out in rain - and back in rain.I have outwalked the furthest city light.I have looked down the saddest city lane.I have passed by the watchman on his beatAnd dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.
Robert Frost
How many things have to happen to you before something occurs to you?
Robert Frost
He moves in darkness as it seems to meNot of woods only and the shade of trees.
Robert Frost
I have stood still and stopped the sound of feetWhen far away an interrupted cryCame over houses from another street,But not to call me back or say good-bye;And further still at an unearthly height,A luminary clock against the skyProclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.I have been one acquainted with the night.
Robert Frost
And lonely as it is that lonelinessWill be more lonely ere it will be less--A blanker whiteness of benighted snowWith no expression, nothing to express.They cannot scare me with their empty spacesBetween stars--on stars where no human race is.I have it in me so much nearer homeTo scare myself with my own desert places.
Robert Frost
They cannot scare me with their empty spacesBetween stars—on stars where no human race is.I have it in me so much nearer homeTo scare myself with my own desert places.
Robert Frost
The only way out is through
Robert Frost
If one by one we counted people outFor the least sin, it wouldn't take us longTo get so we had no one left to live with.For to be social is to be forgiving.
Robert Frost
Forgive me my nonsense as I also forgive the nonsense of those who think they talk sense.
Robert Frost
For, dear me, why abandon a beliefMerely because it ceases to be true?Cling to it long enough, and not a doubtIt will turn true again, for so it goes.Most of the change we think we see in lifeIs due to truths being in and out of favor.As I sit here, and often times, I wishI could be monarch of a desert landI could devote and dedicate foreverTo the truths we keep coming back and back to.––from "The Black Cottage
Robert Frost
But bid life seize the present? It lives less in the present Than in the future always, And less in both together Than in the past. The present Is too much for the senses, Too crowding, too confusing— Too present to imagine.
Robert Frost
Families break up when they get hints you don't intend and miss hints that you do.
Robert Frost
Nobody was ever meant to remember or invent what he did with every cent.
Robert Frost
There is one thing more exasperating than a wife who can cook and won't, and that's a wife who can't cook and will.
Robert Frost
No orchard's the worse for the wintriest storm;But one thing about it, it mustn't get warm."How often already you've had to be told,Keep cold, young orchard. Good-bye and keep cold.Dread fifty above more than fifty below."I have to be gone for a season or so.
Robert Frost
They are dragged to the withered bracken by the load, And they seem not to break; though once they are bowed So low for long, they never right themselves.
Robert Frost
Nature's first green is gold,Her hardest hue to hold.Her early leaf's a flower;But only so an hour.Then leaf subsides to leaf.So Eden sank to grief,So dawn goes down to day.Nothing gold can stay.
Robert Frost
Men work together,' I told him from the heart,'Whether they work together or apart.
Robert Frost
The worst disease which can afflict executives in their work is not, as popularly supposed, alcoholism; it's egotism.
Robert Frost
The TelephoneWhen I was just as far as I could walkFrom here todayThere was an hourAll stillWhen leaning with my head against a flowerI heard you talk.Don't say I didn't for I heard you sayYou spoke from that flower on the window sill-Do you remember what it was you said ''First tell me what it was you thought you heard.''Having found the flower and driven a bee awayI leaned my headAnd holding by the stalkI listened and I thought I caught the wordWhat was itDid you call me by my name Or did you saySomeone said "Come"I heard it as I bowed.''I may have thought as much but not aloud.'Well so I came.
Robert Frost
What is done is done for the love of it- or not really done at all.
Robert Frost
All thought is a feat of association.
Robert Frost
Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence.
Robert Frost
But yield who will to their separation, My object in living is to uniteMy avocation and my vocationAs my two eyes make one in sight.
Robert Frost
The ear is the only true writer and the only true reader. I know people who read without hearing the sentence sounds and they were the fastest readers. Eye readers we call them. They get the meaning by glances. But they are bad readers because they miss the best part of what a good writer puts into his work.
Robert Frost
No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.
Robert Frost
I could give all to Time except -- exceptWhat I myself have held. But why declareThe things forbidden that while the Customs sleptI have crossed to Safety with? For I am There,And what I would not part with I have kept.
Robert Frost
Fragmentary BlueWhy make so much of fragmentary blueIn here and there a bird, or butterfly,Or flower, or wearing-stone, or open eye,When heaven presents in sheets the solid hue?Since earth is earth, perhaps, not heaven (as yet)--Though some savants make earth include the sky;And blue so far above us comes so high,It only gives our wish for blue a whet.
Robert Frost
Where had I heard this wind beforeChange like this to a deeper roar?What would it take my standing there for,Holding open a restive door,Looking down hill to a frothy shore?Summer was past and day was past.Somber clouds in the west were massed.Out in the porch's sagging floor,leaves got up in a coil and hissed,Blindly struck at my knee and missed.Something sinister in the toneTold me my secret must be known:Word I was in the house aloneSomehow must have gotten abroad,Word I was in my life alone,Word I had no one left but God.
Robert Frost
Two such as you with such a master speedCannot be parted nor be swept awayFrom one another once you are agreedThat life is only life forevermoreTogether wing to wing and oar to oar
Robert Frost
I've given offense by saying I'd as soon write free verse as play tennis with the net down.
Robert Frost
Keats mourned that the rainbow, which as a boy had been for him a magic thing, had lost its glory because the physicists had found it resulted merely from the refraction of the sunlight by the raindrops. Yet knowledge of its causation could not spoil the rainbow for me. I am sure that it is not given to man to be omniscient. There will always be something left to know, something to excite the imagination of the poet and those attuned to the great world in which they live (p. 64)
Robert Frost
A poem is never a put-up job, so to speak. It begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness. It is never a thought to begin with.
Robert Frost
GATHERING LEAVESSpades take up leavesNo better than spoons,And bags full of leavesAre light as balloons.I make a great noiseOf rustling all dayLike rabbit and deerRunning away.But the mountains I raiseElude my embrace,Flowing over my armsAnd into my face.I may load and unloadAgain and againTill I fill the whole shed,And what have I then?Next to nothing for weight,And since they grew dullerFrom contact with earth,Next to nothing for color.Next to nothing for use.But a crop is a crop,And who's to say whereThe harvest shall stop?
Robert Frost
Fireflies in the GardenBy Robert Frost 1874–1963 Here come real stars to fill the upper skies, And here on earth come emulating flies, That though they never equal stars in size, (And they were never really stars at heart) Achieve at times a very star-like start. Only, of course, they can't sustain the part.
Robert Frost
I would not come in.I meant not even if asked,And I hadn't been.
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.
Robert Frost
INTO MY OWNOne of my wishes is that those dark trees,tSo old and firm they scarcely show the breeze,tWere not, as ’twere, the merest mask of gloom,tBut stretched away unto the edge of doom.tI should not be withheld but that some dayt Into their vastness I should steal away,tFearless of ever finding open land,tOr highway where the slow wheel pours the sand.tI do not see why I should e’er turn back,tOr those should not set forth upon my trackt To overtake me, who should miss me heretAnd long to know if still I held them dear.tThey would not find me changed from him they knew—tOnly more sure of all I thought was true.
Robert Frost
The way a crowShook down on meThe dust of snowFrom a hemlock treeHas given my heartA change of moodAnd saved some partOf a day I had rued.
Robert Frost
We ran as if to meet the moon.
Robert Frost