Praise Quotes

“Longing, we say, because desire is full of endless distances.”
― Robert Hass, Praise: The Second Poetry Collection by Former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Hass

“August is dust here. Drought
stuns the road,
but juice gathers in the berries.”
― Robert Hass, Praise: The Second Poetry Collection by Former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Hass

“When it is bad…
I go into the night
and the night eats me”
― Robert Hass, Praise: The Second Poetry Collection by Former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Hass

“We asked the captain what course
of action he proposed to take toward
a beast so large, terrifying, and
unpredictable. He hesitated to
answer, and then said judiciously:
“I think I shall praise it."”
― Robert Hass, Praise: The Second Poetry Collection by Former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Hass

“The love of books
is for children
who glimpse in them
a life to come, but
I have come
to that life and
feel uneasy
with the love of books.
This is my life,
time islanded
in poems of dwindled time.”
― Robert Hass, Praise: The Second Poetry Collection by Former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Hass

“So few things we need to know.
And the old wisdoms shudder in us and grow slack.
Like renunciation. Like the melancholy beauty
of giving it all up. Like walking steadfast
in the rhythms, winter light and summer dark.
And the time for cutting furrows and the dance”
― Robert Hass, Praise: The Second Poetry Collection by Former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Hass

“Ah, love, this is fear. This is fear and syllables
and the beginnings of beauty.”
― Robert Hass, Praise: The Second Poetry Collection by Former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Hass

“Sometimes it is good and sometimes
it is dangerous like the ignorance
of particulars, but our words are clear
and our movements give off light.”
― Robert Hass, Praise: The Second Poetry Collection by Former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Hass

“Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings, saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry. ― Robert Hass, from “Meditation at Lagunitas,” Praise ( ‎ Ecco, July 10, 1999)”
― Robert Hass, Praise: The Second Poetry Collection by Former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Hass

“Todo el pensar nuevo es acerca de la pérdida.”
― Robert Hass, Praise: The Second Poetry Collection by Former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Hass

“Meditation at Lagunitas"

All the new thinking is about loss.
In this it resembles all the old thinking.
The idea, for example, that each particular erases
the luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clown-
faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk
of that black birch is, by his presence,
some tragic falling off from a first world
of undivided light. Or the other notion that,
because there is in this world no one thing
to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds,
a word is elegy to what it signifies.
We talked about it late last night and in the voice
of my friend, there was a thin wire of grief, a tone
almost querulous. After a while I understood that,
talking this way, everything dissolves: justice,
pine, hair, woman, you and I. There was a woman
I made love to and I remembered how, holding
her small shoulders in my hands sometimes,
I felt a violent wonder at her presence
like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river
with its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat,
muddy places where we caught the little orange-silver fish
called pumpkinseed. It hardly had to do with her.
Longing, we say, because desire is full
of endless distances. I must have been the same to her.
But I remember so much, the way her hands dismantled bread,
the thing her father said that hurt her, what
she dreamed. 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, Praise: The Second Poetry Collection by Former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Hass