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Harry Mathews

"Well, I had this little notion - I started writing when I was eleven, writing poetry. I was passionately addicted to it; it was my great refuge through adolescence."

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"Well, I had this little notion - I started writing when I was eleven, writing poetry. I was passionately addicted to it; it was my great refuge through adolescence."

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Amber Hurdle

"Women do not have as great a need for poetry because their own essence is poetry."

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Amber Hurdle

"One could do worse than be a swinger of birches."

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Amber Hurdle

"Now begins to rise in me the familiar rhythm; words that have lain dormant now lift, now toss their crests, and fall and rise, and falls again. I am a poet, yes. Surely I am a great poet."

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Amber Hurdle

"There is no Frigate like a book to take us lands away nor any coursers like a page of prancing Poetry."

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Amber Hurdle

"Will the veiled sister pray for Those who walk in darkness, who chose thee and oppose thee, Those who are torn on the horn between season and season, time and time, between Hour and hour, word and word, power and power, those who wait In darkness? Will the veiled sister pray For children at the gate Who will not go away and cannot pray: Pray for those who chose and oppose."

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Amber Hurdle

"Death, like a host, comes smiling to the door;Smiling, he greets us, on that tranquil shoreWhere neither piping bird nor peeping dawnDisturbs the eternal sleep,But in the stillness far withdrawnOur dreamless rest for evermore we keep."

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Amber Hurdle

"Poetry. i am not writing it.(make way for me please)it is my skin. dripping with light."

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Amber Hurdle

"Some winterswill never meltsome summerswill never freezeand some things will only... live in poems."

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Amber Hurdle

"Here the frailest leaves of me and yet my strongest lasting, Here I shade and hide my thoughts, I myself do not expose them, And yet they expose me more than all my other poems."

Explore more quotes by Harry Mathews

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Harry Mathews
"What I said about John was that he liberated me from my anxieties about writing in a correct, acceptable way."
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Harry Mathews
"I'd been brought up on the Upper East Side in a WASP society, which was death on crutches."
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Harry Mathews
"My next project is to get back to that. Actually, to learn how to write poetry. I'm not kidding."
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Harry Mathews
"When Niki and I moved to Paris, there was also the challenge of Paris, an extremely daunting city."
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Harry Mathews
"Well, my relationship to America at the time I left was very limited."
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Harry Mathews
"After the navy, I transferred to Harvard and finished there. I was there the spring term of 1951 and I stayed through the summer term and a whole other year, so I was able to do two years in a little less than a year and a half."
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Harry Mathews
"My mother could never understand why I didn't write a thriller, which I've finally done."
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Harry Mathews
"Well, the great thing for me about poetry is that in good poems the dislocation of words, that is to say, the distance between what they say they're saying and what they are actually saying is at its greatest."
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Harry Mathews
"I thought Cheever was magnificent and that if I could write like him that would be the best I could do. And then I realized that what I really wanted to write had nothing to do with what he was doing."
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Harry Mathews
"And I finished college because I thought how much it would upset my parents if I didn't."
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