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"When modern writers gave up telling stories, they gave up the greatest thing we had."
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"Maybe the example of Southern fiction writing has been so powerful that Southern poets have sort of keyed themselves to that."
"June had drawn out every leaf on the trees. The mothers of Pimlico gave suck to their young. Messages were passing from the Fleet to the Admiralty. Arlington Street and Piccadilly seemed to chafe the very air in the Park and lift its leaves hotly, brilliantly, on waves of that divine vitality which Clarissa loved. To dance, to ride, she had adored all that."
"As far as now I can tell that most Stephen King fans don't know him well. They have read or viewed few works and their judge is based on them... that's now well knowing a writer!"
"Although I love elegant parties, dancing and dining and spending the night with a sweet woman in my arms, my life belongs to literature."
"Of all public figures and benefactors of mankind, no one is loved by history more than the literary patron. Napoleon was just a general of forgotten battles compared with the queen who paid for Shakespeare's meals and beer in the tavern. The statesman who in his time freed the slaves, even he has a few enemies in posterity, whereas the literary patron has none. We thank Gaius Maecenas for the nobility of soul we attribute to Virgil; but he isn't blamed for the selfishness and egocentricity that the poet possessed. The patron creates 'literature through altruism,' something not even the greatest genius can do with a pen."
"Second hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack."
"Alexander the Great slept with 'The Iliad' beneath his pillow. Though I've never led an army, I am a wanderer. I cradle 'The Odyssey' nights while the moon is waning, as if it were the sweet body of a woman."
"Gently the waves would break (Lily heard them in her sleep); tenderly the light fell (it seemed to come through her eyelids). And it all looked, Mr. Carmichael thought, shutting his book, falling asleep, much as it used to look years ago."
"I read it a lot, whenever I find it in a library. Partly because I find new things every time I read it, but also because these BOOKS are always there for me. All of them are there for me. My life changes all the time, but books don't change. My reading of them changes-I can bring new things to them each time. But the words are familiar words. The world is a place you've been before, and it welcomes you back."
"This morning I took out a comma and this afternoon I put it back again."
Explore more quotes by Howard Nemerov
"I liked the kid who wrote me that he had to do a term paper on a modern poet and he was doing me because, though they say you have to read poems twice, he found he could handle mine in one try."
"I've never read a political poem that's accomplished anything. Poetry makes things happen, but rarely what the poet wants."
"I do insist on making what I hope is sense so there's always a coherent narrative or argument that the reader can follow."
"Language is remarkable, except under the extreme constraints of mathematics and logic, it never can talk only about what it's supposed to talk about but is always spreading around."
"History is one of those marvelous and necessary illusions we have to deal with. It's one of the ways of dealing with our world with impossible generalities which we couldn't live without."
"I think there was a revolution in poetry, associated chiefly with Eliot and Pound; but maybe it is of the nature of revolutions or of the nature of history that their innovations should later come to look trivial or indistinguishable from technical tricks."
"Shakespeare tells the same stories over and over in so many guises that it takes a long time before you notice."
"I've thought of the last line of some poems for years and tried them out, It wouldn't work because the last line was much too beautiful for the poem."
"I never abandoned either forms or freedom. I imagine that most of what could be called free verse is in my first book. I got through that fairly early."
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