29 Quotes by Robert Hayden

Know that love has chosen you to live his crucial purposes. Know that love has chosen you. And will not pamper you nor spare;demands obedience to all the rigorous laws of risk, does not pamper, will not spare. Oh, master now love's instruments—complex and not for the fearful, simple and not for the foolish. Master now love's instruments. I who love you tell you this, even as the pitiful killer waits for me, I who love you tell you this.

We must not be frightened nor cajoled into accepting evil as deliverance from evil. We must go on struggling to be human, though monsters of abstractions police and threaten us.

Art is not escape, but a way of finding order in chaos, a way of confronting life.

As you continue writing and rewriting, you begin to see possibilities you hadn’t seen before. Writing a poem is always a process of discovery.

This freedom, this liberty, this beautiful and terrible thing, needful to man as air, usable as earth.

We fight our wish to die.

Sundays too my father got up early and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold, then with cracked hands that ached from labor in the weekday weather made banked fire blazes. No one ever thanked him.

I believe it’s true that one person can make a difference. But how much more difference 100 people make, or rather 99.

It seemed to me as we were talking about Christ rising from the dead, the sun popped over the mountain. That was indicative of Christ rising – a new day. It just makes sense.