"(Soft petals, yes, but not so barren quite, Mingled with these, smooth bean and wrinkled pea;) And go along with you ere you lose sight Of what you came for and become like me, Slave to a springtime passion for the earth. How love burns through the Putting in the Seed On through the watching for that early birth When, just as the soil tarnishes with weed, The sturdy seedling with arched body comes Shouldering its way and shedding the earth crumbs."
Quote collection
Robert Frost quotes (page 14 of 24)
480 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Summoning artists to participate In the august occasions of the state Seems something artists ought to celebrate. Today is for my cause a day of days."
"People are inexterminable - like flies and bed-bugs. There will always be some that survive in cracks and crevices - that's us."
"Oh, give us pleasure in the orch-ard white, Like nothing else by day, like ghosts by night."
"Ants are a curious race"
"A poet must never make a statement simply because it sounds poetically exciting; he must also believe it to be true." - W. H. Auden "A poem...begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness...It finds the thought and the thought finds the words."
"The test is always how we treat the poor."
"One of the hardest things in life to accept is a called third strike."
"It is absurd to think that the only way to tell if a poem is lasting is to wait and see if it lasts. The right reader of a good poem can tell the moment it strikes him that he has taken an immortal wound-that he will never get over it."
"Any work of art must first of all tell a story."
"I see for Nature no defeat In one tree's overthrow Or for myself in my retreat For yet another blow."
"I was under twenty when I deliberately put it to myself one night after good conversation that there are moments when we actually touch in talk what the best writing can only come near. The curse of our book language is not so much that it keeps forever to the same set phrases . . . but that it sounds forever with the same reading tones. We must go out into the vernacular for tones that haven't been brought to book."
"A voice said, Look me in the stars And tell me truly, men of earth, If all the soul-and-body scars Were not too much to pay for birth."
"So when at times the mob is swayed To carry praise or blame too far, We may choose something like a star To stay our minds on and be staid."
"The figure a poem makes. It begins in delight and ends in wisdom."
"There is much in nature against us. But we forget: Take nature altogether since time began, Including human nature, in peace and war, And it must be a little more in favor of man."
"It was far in the sameness of the wood; I was running with joy on the Demon's trail, Though I knew what I hunted was no true god."
"My goal in life is to unite my avocation with my vocation, As my two eyes make one in sight."
"Let's get my incantation right: "I wish I may, I wish I might" Give earth another satellite."
"It's hard to get into this world and hard to get out of it, and what's in between doesn't make much sense."