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"Language cares."
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"Jeez, Hazel," Percy said, "tell your horse to watch his language."Hazel tried not to laugh. "What did he say?""With the cussing removed? He said he can get us to the top."Frank looked incredulous. "I thought the horse couldn't fly!"This time Arion whinnied so angrily, even Hazel could guess he was cursing."Dude," Percy told the horse, "I've gotten suspended for saying less than that..."

"Language is fossil poetry. As the limestone of the continent consists of infinite masses of the shells of animalcules, so language is made up of images, or tropes, which now, in their secondary use, have long ceased to remind us of their poetic origin."

"It is ironic that the only thing separating 'friend' from 'fiend' - is a single letter."

"Chameleonesque, hobbitish, unicorned, stompled, selfishism, and unwakeable may not be real words, but you do know what they mean."

"Because of my language and the pantomime with which most Europeans accompany their speech, I was catalogued as a heavy."
Explore more quotes by Howard Nemerov


"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."


"I've never read a political poem that's accomplished anything. Poetry makes things happen, but rarely what the poet wants."


"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."


"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."


"Shakespeare tells the same stories over and over in so many guises that it takes a long time before you notice."


"When Robert Frost was alive, I was known as the other new England poet, which is to be barely known at all."


"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."
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