Robert Frost Mean Quotations

Pressed into service means pressed out of shape.

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.

''Skepticism,'' is that anything more than we used to mean when we said, ''Well, what have we here?''

Skepticism,'' is that anything more than we used to mean when we said, ''Well, what have we here?'

You've often heard me say - perhaps too often - that poetry is what is lost in translation. It is also what is lost in interpretation. That little poem means just what it says and it says what it means, nothing less but nothing more.

You're searching... For things that don't exist; I mean beginnings. Ends and beginnings - there are no such things. There are only middles.

Poetry begins in trivial metaphors, pretty metaphors, "grace" metaphors, and goes on to the profoundest thinking that we have. Poetry provides the one permissible way of saying one thing and meaning another. People say, "Why don’t you say what you mean?" We never do that, do we, being all of us too much poets. We like to talk in parables and in hints and in indirections — whether from diffidence or some other instinct.

Of course there is matter for remark in poems. Nobody denies that. But it must be solemnly laid on everybody in this world to make his own observations and remarks. That's what we mean by thinking, and that's about all we mean. A teacher says to a pupil "Watch me notice a few things in the next few months: let's see you notice a few things too."

Skepticism, is that anything more than we used to mean when we said, Well, what have we here?

There are tones of voices that mean more than words.