Robert Hass Quotes

It's hell writing and it's hell not writing. The only tolerable state is having just written.

Imagination runs through the places where we live like water. We need both things-a living knowledge of the land and a live imagination of it and our place in it- if we are going to preserve it.

All the new thinking is about loss. In this it resembles all the old thinking

Take the time to write. You can do your life's work in half an hour a day.

August is dust here. Drought
stuns the road,
but juice gathers in the berries.

Nostalgia locates desire in the past where it suffers no active conflict and can be yearned toward pleasantly.

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