Robert Hass quotes

The Earth forgives the previous year every year. (Robert Hass)
Take the time to write. You can do your life's work in half an hour a day.
Robert Hass
When I was in high school in the '50s you were supposed to be an Elvis Presley, a James Dean, a Marlon Brando or a Kingston Trio type in a button-down shirt headed for the fraternities at Stanford or Cal.
Robert Hass
There are moments when the body is as numinous as words, days that are the good flesh continuing. Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings, saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.
Robert Hass
I got interested in the question of literacy because writers are always moaning about why more people don't read books.
Robert Hass
Longing, we say, because desire is full of endless distances.
Robert Hass
Writing is an incessant process of discovery.
Robert Hass
I think that the job of poetry, its political job, is to refresh the idea of justice, which is going dead in us all the time.
Robert Hass
When I was in college, I lost my scholarship one year. I had enough money for tuition, but not room and board. So I camped in the hills.
Robert Hass
You begin to see that all of these things are connected: The kind of cuts that mean less environmental protection are also the kind of cuts that mean less musical education for the schools and that also mean more overcrowded schools.
Robert Hass
The market doesn't make communities. Markets make networks of self-interested individuals, and they work as long as there's more than enough to go around. (Robert Hass)
It's hell writing and it's hell not writing. The only tolerable state is having just written.
Robert Hass
In California in the early Spring, There are pale yellow mornings, when the mist burns slowly into day, The air stings like Autumn, clarifies like pain - Well, I have dreamed this coast myself.
Robert Hass
The first book that really knocked me out was the 'Brothers Karamazov.' I read it when I was a senior in high school.
Robert Hass
All the new thinking is about loss. In this it resembles all the old thinking.
Robert Hass
I teach a lecture course on American poetry to as many as 150 students. For a lot of them, its their only elective, so this is their one shot. Theyll take the Russian Novel or American Poetry, so I want to give them the high points, the inescapable poets.
Robert Hass
Not to make too much of a claim for poetry, but this is a question that goes to the moral heart of the business of any art: How do you see the world, and what right do you have to see the world in the way that you do?
Robert Hass