Robert Frost Quotes

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I never dared be radical when young
For fear it would make me conservative when old.

Robert Frost (Ten Mills - Precaution, 1936)

It is the future that creates his present.
All is an interminable chain of longing.

Robert Frost (Escapist - Never)

The old dog barks backward without getting up.
I can remember when he was a pup.

Robert Frost (Ten Mills - Span of Life, 1936)

We dance round in a ring and suppose.
But the secret sits in the middle and knows.

Robert Frost (Ten Mills - Ring Around, 1936)

A mother takes twenty years to make a man of her boy, and another woman makes a fool of him in twenty minutes.

Robert Frost

The best things and best people rise out of their separateness; I'm against a homogenized society because I want the cream to rise.

Robert Frost

The brain is a wonderful organ; it starts working the moment you get up in the morning and does not stop until you get into the office.

Robert Frost

And were an epitaph to be my story, I’d have a short one ready for my own.
I would have written of me on my stone: I had a lover’s quarrel with the world.

Robert Frost

A poem... begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness. It is never a thought to begin with. It is at its best when it is a tantalizing vagueness.

Robert Frost

Always fall in with what you're asked to accept. Take what is given, and make it over your way. My aim in life has always been to hold my own with whatever's going. Not against: with.

Robert Frost (Quoted in Vogue, 1963)

It is absurd to think that the only way to tell if a poem is lasting is to wait and see if it lasts. The right reader of a good poem can tell the moment it strikes him that he has taken an immortal wound - that he will never get over it.

Robert Frost (The Poetry of Amy Lowell, 1925)

Let chaos storm!
Let cloud shapes swarm!
I wait for form.

Robert Frost (Ten Mills - Pertinax, 1936)

I have been one acquainted with the night.
I have walked out in rain - and back in rain.
I have outwalked the furthest city light.

Robert Frost (Acquainted with the Night, 1928)

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I -
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Robert Frost (The Road Not Taken, 1916)

It went many years,
But at last came a knock,
And I thought of the door
With no lock to lock.

Robert Frost (The Lockless Door)

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

Robert Frost (Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening)

If one by one we counted people out
For the least sin, it wouldn't take us long
To get so we had no one left to live with.
For to be social is to be forgiving.

Robert Frost (The Star-Splitter)

Wind goes from farm to farm in wave on wave,
But carries no cry of what is hoped to be.
There may be little or much beyond the grave,
But the strong are saying nothing until they see.

Robert Frost (The Strong Are Saying Nothing)

Never ask of money spent
Where the spender thinks it went.
Nobody was ever meant
To remember or invent
What he did with every cent.

Robert Frost (Ten Mills - Money, 1936)

My dear,
It’s who first thought the thought. You’re searching, Joe,
For things that don’t exist; I mean beginnings.
Ends and beginnings - there are no such things.
There are only middles.

Robert Frost (In the Home Stretch)

We've looked and looked, but after all where are we?
Do we know any better where we are,
And how it stands between the night tonight
And a man with a smoky lantern chimney?
How different from the way it ever stood?

Robert Frost (The Star-Splitter)

Will the blight end the chestnut?
The farmers rather guess not.
It keeps smouldering at the roots
And sending up new shoots
Till another parasite
Shall come to end the blight.

Robert Frost (Ten Mills - Evil Tendencies Cancel, 1936)

Here come real stars to fill the upper skies,
And here on earth come emulating flies,
That though they never equal stars in size,
(And they were never really stars at heart)
Achieve at times a very star-like start.
Only, of course, they can't sustain the part.

Robert Frost (Fireflies in the Garden)

My object in living is to unite
My avocation and my vocation
As my two eyes make one in sight.
Only where love and need are one,
And the work is play for mortal stakes,
Is the deed ever really done
For heaven and the future´s sakes.

Robert Frost (Two Tramps in Mud Time, 1936)

Far in the pillared dark
Thrush music went —
Almost like a call to come in
To the dark and lament.
     But no, I was out for stars;
I would not come in.
I meant not even if asked;
And I hadn't been.

Robert Frost (Come In, 1942)

He never found her, though he looked
Everywhere,
And he asked at her mother's house
Was she there.
      Sudden and swift and light as that
The ties gave,
And he learned of finalities
Besides the grave.

Robert Frost (The Impulse)

I turned to speak to God
About the world's despair;
But to make bad matters worse
I found God wasn't there.
God turned to speak to me
(Don't anybody laugh)
God found I wasn't there
At least not over half.

Robert Frost (Ten Mills - Not All There, 1936)

Sometimes when I watch trees sway,
From the window or the door.
I shall set forth for somewhere,
I shall make the reckless choice
Some day when they are in voice
And tossing so as to scare
The white clouds over them on.
I shall have less to say,
But I shall be gone.

Robert Frost (The Sound of the Trees, 1920)

When I was young my teachers were the old.
I gave up fire for form till I was cold.
I suffered like a metal being cast.
I went to school to age to learn the past.
     Now when I am old my teachers are the young.
What can't be molded must be cracked and sprung.
I strain at lessons fit to start a suture.
I got to school to youth to learn the future.

Robert Frost (What Fifty Said)

Originality and initiative are what I ask for my country. For myself the originality need be no more than the freshness of a poem run in the way I have described: from delight to wisdom. The figure is the same as for love. Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting. A poem may be worked over once it is in being, but may not be worried into being. Its most precious quality will remain its having run itself and carried away the poet with it. Read it a hundred times: it will forever keep its freshness as a petal keeps its fragrance. It can never lose its sense of a meaning that once unfolded by surprise as it went.

Robert Frost (The Figure a Poem Makes, 1939)

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Robert Frost Biography

Born: March 26, 1874
Died: January 29, 1963

Robert Frost was an American poet. Frost and his poetry was and still is held in great esteem. He is best known for his realistic depictions of the life in the countryside.

Notable Works/Poems
Mending Wall (1914)
The Death of the Hired Man (1915)
The Road Not Taken (1916)
Out, Out (1916)
Fire and Ice (1920)
Nothing Gold Can Stay (1923)
Acquainted with the Night (1928)
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