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Poetry Quote by Ian McEwan

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““These names mean nothing to Perowne. But he understands how eminent poets, like senior consultants, live in a watchful, jealous world in which reputations are edgily tended and a man can be brought low by status anxiety. Poets, or at least this poet, are as earthbound as the rest.””

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Poetry

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“As you will see, we do not believe that artists have an obligation to strike up attitudes to the war. Indeed, they are wise…

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You could say that all novels are spy novels and all novelists are spy masters.

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I've never had a moment's doubt. I love you. I believe in you completely. You are my dearest one. My reason for life.

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“It is shaming sometimes, how the body will not, or cannot, lie about emotions.”

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“While my friends struggled and calculated, I reached a solution by a set of floating steps that were partly visual, partly just a feeling…

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“Once, on a walk by a river- Eskdale in low reddish sunlight, with a dusting of snow- his daughter quoted to him an opening…

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“Perhaps it's one of those cases of a microcosm giving you the whole world. Like a spode dinner plate. Or a single cell. Or,…

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Who you get, and how it works out- there's so much luck involved, as well as the million branching consequences of your conscious choice…

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“On Chesil Beach he could have called out to Florence, he could have gone after her. He did not know, or would not have…

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It was always the view of my parents...that hot weather encouraged loose morals among young people.

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I apologize for being obvious, but every time I watch the curtain come down on even a halfway decent production of a Shakespeare play…

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I would rather be physically disabled obviously than mentally. I would rather be paraplegic than nuts. And it is a terrifying prospect and actually…

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I fell in love with social work, and that was my undoing as a poet.

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A poet is wounded into speech, and he examines these wounds, meticulously, to discover how to heal them. The bad poet harangues at the…

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“Time gives poetry to a battlefield...”

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The poetry from the eighteenth century was prose; the prose from the seventeenth century was poetry.

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“It took me years to learn to sit at my desk for more than two minutes at a time, to put up with the…

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“In the streets, the children scream, the lovers cried, and the poets dreamed,” he crooned, putting down the metal grill tongs to take my…

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Some minds corrode and grow inactive under the loss of personal liberty; others grow morbid and irritable; but it is the nature of the…

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You don’t read or overhear the voice in the poem, you are the voice in the poem.

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All lyrical work must, as a whole, be perfectly intelligible, but in some particulars a little unintelligible.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

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The world's history is a divine poem, of which the history of every nation is a canto, and every man a word. Its strains…

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