Robin Robertson > Quotes

“What we understand is that society must allow room for the irrational, in healthy balance with the rational.”
― Robin Robertson, The Bacchae

“Sense is nonsense to a fool.”
― Robin Robertson, The Bacchae

“He is the god of epiphanies—sudden spiritual manifestations—and of transformation, and there is more shape-shifting associated with Dionysus than with any other Greek god except for his father, Zeus, whose metamorphoses were usually prompted by his pursuit of women. The”
― Robin Robertson, The Bacchae

“Some years later, Zeus and Hera were arguing about who got more pleasure from sex: men or women. To settle the argument, they called for Tiresias, who had lived as both. Tiresias took the side of Zeus, saying that women’s pleasure was greater, and Hera, in her fury, turned him blind.”
― Robin Robertson, The Bacchae

“Nietzsche distinguishes between the two oppositional human artistic impulses, Apollonian and Dionysian.”
― Robin Robertson, The Bacchae

“Building and demolition seem to happen here within the span of a human life – so citizens can either watch their own mortal decline, or see themselves outliving their cities. This is why I miss the island. Nature. We love nature because it dies, and then comes back to life. A resurrection we can believe in.”
― Robin Robertson, The Long Take: A noir narrative

“What the snow has furred to silence, uniformity, frost amplifies, makes singular: giving every form a sound, an edge, as if frost wants to know what snow tries to forget. And so he drinks for winter, for the coming year, to open all the beautiful tiny doors in their craquelure of frost; and he drinks like the snow falling, trying to close the biggest door of all.”
― Robin Robertson, Sailing the Forest: Selected Poems