What Simone Weil said politics has meant all along, which means that you fight for 11 percent, 12 percent, 13 percent, that you avoid golden-age thinking and romantic melancholy and you just keep pushing. — Robert Hass Copy Share Image
“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… — Robert Hass Copy Share Image
It's the same with this idea of a literate public, and also of a democracy in which people have access to and really read… — Robert Hass Copy Share Image
All the new thinking is about loss. In this it resembles all the old thinking — Robert Hass Copy Share Image
Poetry, when it takes sides, when it proposes solutions, isn't any smarter than anybody else. — Robert Hass Copy Share Image
When I was in college, I lost my scholarship one year. I had enough money for tuition, but not room and board. So I… — Robert Hass Copy Share Image
After Pope, in the beginning of Romanticism, people developed the idea that imagination rather than reason was a special form of knowledge and its… — Robert Hass Copy Share Image
They are the kinds of things that make us a community: attachment to place, attachment to local arts traditions, the ability to read literature,… — Robert Hass Copy Share Image
I think that were I in the middle of an obsession to write about, say, sudden oak death in California or my grandchildren or… — Robert Hass Copy Share Image
I suppose there's something to be said for the sheer reinforcement of our beliefs, but really I think poetry is more useful as disenchantment… — Robert Hass Copy Share Image
If you were making poetry out of convictions - trying to convince other people - you were in the territory of rhetoric, and that… — Robert Hass Copy Share Image
Milton was the first person who really experimented with putting politics into sonnets. — Robert Hass Copy Share Image
When I came into the job, funding for the humanities at the federal level was being drastically cut. This was the high tide of… — Robert Hass Copy Share Image
