When the immense drugged universe explodes In a cascade of unendurable colour And leaves us gasping naked, This is no more than the ectasy of chaos: Hold fast, with both hands, to that royal love Which alone, as we know certainly, restores Fragmentation into true being. Ecstasy of Chaos.

— Robert Graves

Robert Graves Quotes

No poem is worth anything unless it starts from a poetic trance, out of which you can be wakened by interruption as from a dream. In fact, it is the same thing.

— Robert Graves

Hardly one soldier in a hundred was inspired by religious feeling of even the crudest kind. It would have been difficult to remain religious in the trenches even if one had survived the irreligion of the training battalion at home.

— Robert Graves

One gets to the heart of the matter by a series of experiences in the same pattern, but in different colors.

— Robert Graves

To recommend a monarchy on account of the prosperity it gives the provinces seems to me like recommending that a man should have liberty to treat his children as slaves, if at the same time he treats his slaves with reasonable consideration.

— Robert Graves

But give thanks, at least, that you still have Frost’s poems; and when you feel the need of solitude, retreat to the companionship of moon, water, hills and trees. Retreat, he reminds us, should not be confused with escape. And take these poems along for good luck!

— Robert Graves

You mean that people who continue virtuous in an old-fashioned way must inevitably suffer in times like these?

— Robert Graves

She tells her love while half asleep, In the dark hours, With half-words whispered low: As Earth stirs in her winter sleep And puts out grass and flowers Despite the snow, Despite the falling snow.

— Robert Graves

Love at first sight’some say misnaming Discovery of twinned helplessness Against the huge tug of procreation. But friendship at first sight? This also Catches fiercely at the surprised heart So that the cheek blanches then blushes.

— Robert Graves

In love as in sport, the amateur status must be strictly maintained.

— Robert Graves

Prose books are the show dogs I breed and sell to support my cat.

— Robert Graves

Myths are seldom simple, and never irresponsible.

— Robert Graves

I don’t really feel my poems are mine at all. I didn’t create them out of nothing. I owe them to my relations with other people.

— Robert Graves

The function of poetry is religious invocation of the muse; its use is the experience of mixed exaltation and horror that her presence excites.

— Robert Graves

What we now call “finance” is, I hold, an intellectual perversion of what began as warm human love.

— Robert Graves

With eager dragon-eyes;.

— Robert Graves

The decline of true taste for food is the beginning of a decline in a national culture as a whole. When people have lost their authentic personal taste, they lose their personality and become the instruments of other people’s wills.

— Robert Graves

The poet’s first rule must be never to bore his readers; and his best way of keeping this rule is never to bore himself-which, of course, means to write only when he has something urgent to say.

— Robert Graves

Faults in English prose derive not so much from lack of knowledge, intelligence or art as from lack of thought, patience or goodwill.

— Robert Graves

Marriage, like money, is still with us; and, like money, progressively devalued.

— Robert Graves

This seems to me a philosophical question, and therefore irrelevant, question. A poet’s destiny is to love.

— Robert Graves
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