Robert Lowell Quotes

Age is our reconciliation with dullness.

Pray for the grace of accuracy Vermeer gave to the sun’s illumination stealing like the tide across a map to his girl solid with yearning.

Those blessed structures, plot and rhyme—why are they no help to me now I want to make something imagined, not recalled?

We feel the machine slipping from our hands As if someone else were steering; If we see the light at the end of the tunnel, It’s the light of the oncoming train.

My Darling, prickly hedgehog of the heart, chocolates, cherries, hairshirts, pinks and glass— when we joined in the sublime blindness of courtship loving lost all its vice with half its virtue.

Life is too short to silver over this tarnish. The gods, employed to haunt and punish husbands, have no hand for trigger-fine distinctions, their myopia makes all error mortal.