The Wild God of the World Quotes

“Old violence is not too old to beget new values.”
― Robinson Jeffers, The Wild God of the World: An Anthology of Robinson Jeffers

“The flesh of my body
Is nothing in my longing. What you think I want
Will be pure dust after hundreds of years and something from me be crying to something from you
High up in their air.”
― Robinson Jeffers, The Wild God of the World: An Anthology of Robinson Jeffers

“For now I know that whatever bent this world around us, whether it was God or whether it was blind
Chance as blind as my father,
Is perfectly good, we're given a dollar of life to gamble against a dollar's worth of desire
And if we win we have both but losers lose nothing,”
― Robinson Jeffers, The Wild God of the World: An Anthology of Robinson Jeffers

“Sad sons of the stormy fall,
No escape, you have to inflict and endure; surely it is time for you
To learn to touch the diamond within to the diamond outside,
Thinning your humanity a little between the invulnerable diamonds,
Knowing that your angry choices and hopes and terrors are in vain,
But life and death not in vain; and the world is like a flight of swans.”
― Robinson Jeffers, The Wild God of the World: An Anthology of Robinson Jeffers

“I would burn my right hand in a slow fire
To change the future . . . I should do foolishly. The beauty of modern
Man is not in the persons but in the
Disastrous rhythm, the heavy and mobile masses, the dance of the
Dream-led masses down the dark mountain.”
― Robinson Jeffers, The Wild God of the World: An Anthology of Robinson Jeffers

“By God, if you go killing
Unhappiness who'll be left in the houses?”
― Robinson Jeffers, The Wild God of the World: An Anthology of Robinson Jeffers

“I wish the little rivers under the laughing kingfishers in every canyon were fire, and the ocean
Fire, and my heart not afraid to go down.”
― Robinson Jeffers, The Wild God of the World: An Anthology of Robinson Jeffers

“The omnisecular spirit keeps the old with the new also.
Nothing at all has suffered erasure.
There is life not of our time. He calls ungainly bodies
As beautiful as the grace of horses.
He is weary of nothing; he watches air-planes; he watches pelicans.”
― Robinson Jeffers, The Wild God of the World: An Anthology of Robinson Jeffers

“for a poem
Needs multitude, multitudes of thoughts, all fierce, all flesh-eaters, musically clamorous
Bright hawks that hover and dart headlong, and ungainly
Gray hungers fledged with desire of transgression, salt slimed beaks, from the sharp
Rock-shores of the world and the secret waters.”
― Robinson Jeffers, The Wild God of the World: An Anthology of Robinson Jeffers

“what are we,
The beast that walks upright, with speaking lips
And little hair,”
― Robinson Jeffers, The Wild God of the World: An Anthology of Robinson Jeffers

“This coast crying out for tragedy like all beautiful places,”
― Robinson Jeffers, The Wild God of the World: An Anthology of Robinson Jeffers

“the noise of the ocean
Trampling its granite;”
― Robinson Jeffers, The Wild God of the World: An Anthology of Robinson Jeffers

“I think . . . I think says the brain . . .
But the little spire with the eyes of ecstasy
On the brain’s dome is the life,
Not thinking anything,
But flaming . . . little fool you will cease
Flaming when you flame up to peace.”
― Robinson Jeffers, The Wild God of the World: An Anthology of Robinson Jeffers