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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
"Eternity is a mere moment, just long enough for a joke."
"The value of time is immeasurable."
"Sometimes I feel like if you just watch things, just sit still and let the world exist in front of you - sometimes I swear that just for a second time freezes and the world pauses in its tilt. Just for a second. And if you somehow found a way to live in that second, then you would live forever."
"Worrying about what happened on Monday, or, what might happen on Wednesday, is at the expense of one's Tuesday."
"Don't equate effective living to being busy."
"People wish to learn to swim and at the same time to keep one foot on the ground."
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Explore more quotes by Thom Gunn
"When I first started teaching at Berkeley in 1958, I could not announce that I was gay to anybody, though probably quite a few of my fellow teachers knew."
"I try not to observe myself in the process of composing a poem because I don't want to come up with a formula, which I would then be unscrupulous in using."
"We learned in the university to consider Wordsworth and Keats as Romantics. They were only a generation apart, but Wordsworth didn't even read Keats's book when he gave him a copy."
"I notice that students, particularly for gay students, it's too easy to write about my last trick or something. It's not very interesting to the reader."
"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."
"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."
"I had assumed that I would age with all my friends growing old around me, dying off very gradually one by one. And here was a plague that cut them off so early."
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