A Quote by Robert Hass

There are either poems about sex/love or God. — © Robert Hass
There are either poems about sex/love or God.

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In your thirties, you're much more comfortable with sex. First of all, sex is something you've done more. You know you can have sex just to have sex; you can have sex with friends; you can have sex with people you love; you can have sex with people you don't like, but the sex is good. And you can joke about sex much more.
Sex with love is the greatest thing in life. But sex without love--that's not so bad either.
My days are filled with work I love - reading poems, writing poems, talking with people about poems, teaching, directing a writing program, hosting readings, etc.
When I worked on a magazine, I learned that there are many, many writers writing that can't write at all; and they keep on writing all the cliches and bromides and 1890 plots, and poems about Spring and poems about Love, and poems they think are modern because they are done in slang or staccato style, or written with all the 'i's' small.
Love is the creative refinement of sex energy. And so, when love reaches perfection, the absence of sex automatically follows. A life of love, an abstinence from physical pleasures is called brahmacharya, and anyone who wishes to be free from sex must develop his capacity to love. Freedom from sex cannot be achieved through supersession. Liberation from sex is only possible through love.
On the whole, God’s love for us is a much safer subject to think about than our love for Him. Nobody can always have devout feelings: and even if we could, feelings are not what God principally cares about. Christian Love, either towards God or towards man, is an affair of the will.
I tend to think that cricket is the greatest thing that God ever created on earth - certainly greater than sex, although sex isn't too bad either.
The poem in Where Good Swimmers Drown are love poems. But love poems that defy the divisions between emotion and intellect, private and public, life and art, writer and reader. To read Elbe's poems is to discover not only what it means to be in love, but what it means to be alive.
Every celebrity has become a celebrity because of sex and money. But few celebrities like talking about either sex or money; they would rather talk about ideas, or ideals, or solving the world's problems - all against a backdrop of sex and money.
Love can become devotion. Love is the first step; only then can devotion flower. But for us even love is a faraway reality, sex is the only real thing. Love has two possibilities: either it falls into sex and becomes a bodily thing, or it rises into devotion and becomes a thing of the spirit. Love is just in between. Just below it is the abyss of sex, and beyond it is the open sky - the infinite sky of devotion.
The British often shy away from any cinematic interpretation of real sex. They sometimes have what I call "subtle sex," which is really introspective and has soft music in the background. Either that or it's played for comedy. The British are kind of hung up about sex. They find it kind of titillating and they make jokes about it because they're nervous.
Poems don't have to rhyme... Poems are about beauty and emotion; in other words poems are about feelings.
When you begin to write poems because you love language, because you love poetry. Something happens that makes you write poems. And the writing of poems is incredibly pleasurable and addictive.
He's comming to meet me on Sun. Cant wait!!... Please God let him love me!!... This could be it [followed by five happy faces].... Hes going to publish my pictures Im so glad I didn't sleep with him either!... I hate for men to want sex all the time. I hate sex anyway. (1992, diary entry as she prepares for a meeting with Paul Marciano, head of Guess.)
Acting is like sex: you either do it and don't talk about it, or you talk about it and don't do it. That's why I'm always suspicious of people who talk too much about either.
The idea that 'preaching the Gospel' has nothing to do with sex and that 'preaching about sex' has nothing to do with the Gospel betrays layers and layers of seriously misguided thinking. When we divorce God's love from sexual love, as Pope Benedict says, 'the essence of Christianity' becomes 'decisively cut off from the complex fabric of human life.'
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