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"It was difficult being a teacher and out of the closet in the '50s. By the time I retired, the English department was proud of having a gay poet of a certain minor fame. It was a very satisfactory change!"
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Exlpore more Time quotes
"The mind of man, moreover, works with equal strangeness upon the body of time. An hour, once it lodges in the queer element of the human spirit, may be stretched to fifty or a hundred times its clock length; on the other hand, an hour may be accurately represented on the timepiece of the mind by one second."
"Time is inexplicable because it moves " clicks away " at steady increments, while increasing the past and bringing the future into the present. Time has a necessary affinity with both heaven and the earthly reality. 'Pythagoras, when he was asked what time was, answered that it is the soul of the world.' Plato said that time and heaven must be coexistent. Without time nothing can be created or generated in the universe, nor is anything intelligible without eternity. Time is no accident or affection, but the cause, power, and principle of the symmetry and order that confines all created beings, by which the animated nature of the universe moves."
"If you want to know the value of a minute ask the person who came to the train station or airport a minute late."
"You may need an additional money to make things happen and have it, but you can have an additional time anywhere. Value your time; as you wait, it is passing!"
Explore more quotes by Thom Gunn
"I deliberately decided to write a kind of guide to leather bars for straight people, for people not into leather, so that people could see what it was all about."
"I was reading the poems of Rochester. Rochester made himself out to be bisexual, but I think that was only to shock. Most of his poetry is sexual, even pornographic."
"While I don't satisfy my curiosity about the way I work, I'm terribly curious about the way other poets work. But I would think that's true about many of us."
"I admired what my students were writing, but I think their improvement doesn't directly result from me but from being in a class, being with each other."
"When I was an undergraduate I had very badly annotated editions of Shakespeare's sonnets, all of which left out the important fact that will has a sexual sense in Shakespeare's sonnets."
"I was at a benefit for some imprisoned students in the '60s at San Francisco State, and there were lots of poets reading for the benefit: one was Elizabeth Bishop."
"When I first started to write, I was aware of being queer, but I didn't write about it. Queer poems would probably not have been accepted by the editors I sent them to."
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