Robert Hass

“As poet laureate, I was asked to be a spokesman for literature.”

“Writing is an incessant process of discovery.”

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

“The first book that really knocked me out was the 'Brothers Karamazov.' I read it when I was a senior in high school.”

“The Earth forgives the previous year every year.”

“‘Paradise Lost’ was printed in an edition of no more than 1,500 copies and transformed the English language. Took a while. Wordsworth had new ideas about nature: Thoreau read Wordsworth, Muir read Thoreau, Teddy Roosevelt read Muir, and we got a lot of national parks. Took a century. What poetry gives us is an archive, the fullest existent archive of what human beings have thought and felt by the kind of artists who loved language in a way that allowed them to labor over how you make a music of words to render experience exactly and fully.”