Quotes by Robert W. Service

“I keep collecting books I know I'll never, never read; My wife and daughter tell me so, And yet I never heed. "Please make me," says some wistful tome, "A wee bit of yourself."And so I take my treasure home, And tuck it in a shelf. And now my very shelves complain; They jam and over-spill. They say: "Why don't you ease our strain?" "Some day," I say, "I will." So book by book they plead and sigh; I pick and dip and scan; Then put them back, distressed that I Am such a busy man. Now, there's my Boswell and my Sterne, my Gibbon and Defoe; To savor Swift I'll never learn, Montaigne I may not know. On Bacon I will never sup, For Shakespeare I've no time; Because I'm busy making up These jingly bits of rhyme. Chekov is caviar to me, While Stendhal makes me snore; Poor Proust is not my cup of tea, And Balzac is a bore. I have their books, I love their names, And yet alas! they head, With Lawrence, Joyce and Henry James, My Roster of Unread. I think it would be very well If I commit a crime, And get put in a prison cell And not allowed to rhyme; Yet given all these worthy books According to my need, I now caress with loving looks, But never, never read."(from, Book Lover)””

“I have no doubt at all the Devil grins,As seas of ink I spatter. Ye gods, forgive my "literary" sins --The other kind don't matter.””

“No man can be a failure if he thinks he's a success; If he thinks he is a winner, then he is.””

“Now a promise made is a debt unpaid, and the trail has its own stern code.””

“Have you suffered, starved and triumphed, grovelled down, yet grasped at glory,Grown bigger in the bigness of the whole? 'Done things' just for the doing, letting babblers tell the story,Seeing through the nice veneer the naked soul? Have you seen God in His splendours, heard the text that nature renders?(You'll never hear it in the family pew.) The simple things, the true things, the silent men who do things–Then listen to the wild–it's calling you.””

“Yet it isn't the gold that I'm wantingSo much as just finding the gold.It's the great, big, broad land 'way up yonder,It's the forests where silence has lease;It's the beauty that thrills me with wonder,It's the stillness that fills me with peace.””

“There are strange things done in the midnight sun By the men who moil for gold; The Arctic trails have their secret tales That would make your blood run cold;The Northern Lights have seen queer sights, But the queerest they ever did see Was that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge I cremated Sam McGee.””

“There’s a land”

“The Call of the WildThey have cradled you in custom, they have primed you with their preaching, They have soaked you in convention through and through; They have put you in a showcase; you're a credit to their teaching– But can't you hear the wild?–it's calling you. Let us probe the silent places, let us seek what luck betide us; Let us journey to a lonely land I know. There's a whisper on the night-wind, there's a star agleam to guide us, And the wild is calling, calling . . . . let us go.””

“Give me the scorn of the stars and a peak defiant;Wail of the pines and a wind with the shout of a giant;Night and a trail unknown and a heart reliant.””

“There's a race of men that don't fit in, A race that can't stay still;So they break the hearts of kith and kin, And they roam the world at will.They range the field and they rove the flood, And they climb the mountain's crest;Theirs is the curse of the gypsy blood, And they don't know how to rest.If they just went straight they might go far; They are strong and brave and true;But they're always tired of the things that are, And they want the strange and new.They say: "Could I find my proper groove, What a deep mark I would make!"So they chop and change, and each fresh move Is only a fresh mistake.And each forgets, as he strips and runs With a brilliant, fitful pace,It's the steady, quiet, plodding ones Who win in the lifelong race.And each forgets that his youth has fled, Forgets that his prime is past,Till he stands one day, with a hope that's dead, In the glare of the truth at last.He has failed, he has failed; he has missed his chance; He has just done things by half.Life's been a jolly good joke on him, And now is the time to laugh.Ha, ha! He is one of the Legion Lost; He was never meant to win;He's a rolling stone, and it's bred in the bone; He's a man who won't fit in.””

“A half-dead thing in a stark, dead world, clean mad for the muck called gold;While high overhead, green, yellow and red, the North Lights swept in bars?-Then you've a hunch was the music meant...hunger and night and the stars.””

“The following obituary appeared in the Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph of Sept. 16, 1958:A GREAT POET died last week in Lancieux, France, at the age of 84.He was not a poet's poet. Fancy-Dan dilletantes will dispute the description "great."He was a people's poet. To the people he was great. They understood him, and knew that any verse carrying the by-line of Robert W. Service would be a lilting thing, clear, clean and power-packed, beating out a story with a dramatic intensity that made the nerves tingle.And he was no poor, garret-type poet, either. His stuff made money hand over fist. One piece alone, The Shooting of Dan McGrew, rolled up half a million dollars for him. He lived it up well and also gave a great deal to help others."The only society I like," he once said, "is that which is rough and tough - and the tougher the better. That's where you get down to bedrock and meet human people."He found that kind of society in the Yukon gold rush, and he immortalized it.””

“A half-dead thing in a stark dead world, clean mad for the muck called gold.””