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"Language cares."
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"Words are clothes that thoughts wear."
"Perhaps then one reason why we have no great poet, novelist or critic writing today is that we refuse to allow words their liberty. We pin them down to one meaning, their useful meaning: the meaning which makes us catch the train, the meaning which makes us pass the examination."
"A word is not filling in the gaps, but the fertilization of silence."
"He had a word, too. Love, he called it. But I had been used to words for a long time. I knew that that word was like the others: just a shape to fill a lack; that when the right time came, you wouldn't need a word for that anymore than for pride or fear."
"Our language now has become quick-moving (in syllables), and may be very supple and nimble, but is rather thin in sound and in sense too often diffuse and vague. the language of our forefathers, especially in verse, was slow, not very nimble, but very sonorous, and was intensely packed and concentrated - or could be in a good poet."
"Chameleonesque, hobbitish, unicorned, stompled, selfishism, and unwakeable may not be real words, but you do know what they mean."
Explore more quotes by Howard Nemerov
"The historian is terribly responsible to what he can discern are the facts of the case, but he's nothing if he doesn't make out a case."
"Obvious enough that generalities work to protect the mind from the great outdoors; is it possible that this was in fact their first purpose?"
"Mostly the thought and the verse come inseparably. In my poem Poetics, it's as close as I come to telling how I do it."
"I've never read a political poem that's accomplished anything. Poetry makes things happen, but rarely what the poet wants."
"Robert Frost had always said you mustn't think of the last line first, or it's only a fake poem, not a real one. I'm inclined to agree."
"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."
"For a Jewish Puritan of the middle class, the novel is serious, the novel is work, the novel is conscientious application why, the novel is practically the retail business all over again."
"When I was starting to write, the great influence was T.S. Eliot and after that William Butler Yeats."
"We're not in love with Literature all the time - especially when you have to teach it every day."
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