quotes from classic

Certainly he is not of the generation that regards honesty as the best policy. However, he does regard it as a policy. (On President Richard M Nixon)

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The toughest thing about success is that you've got to keep on being a success. Talent is only a starting point in this business. You've got to keep on working that talent. Someday I'll reach for it and it won't be there.

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Life is 10 what you make it, and 90 how you take it.

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If poetry is like an orgasm, an academic can be likened to someone who studies the passion-stains on the bedsheets.

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In Pierre Elliott Trudeau, Canada has at last produced a political leader worthy of assassination.

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Once you touch the biographies of human beings, the notion that political beliefs are logically determined collapses like a pricked balloon.

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Most writers of verse have several different personalities. The ideal is to find a style or a method that includes them all.

more quotes from Ted Hughes

Fishing provides that connection with the whole living world. It gives you the opportunity of being totally immersed, turning back into yourself in a good way. A form of meditation, some form of communion with levels of yourself that are deeper than the ordinary self.

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It took the whole of Creation To produce my foot, my each feather: Now I hold Creation in my foot.

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Good metrical rhymed verse, if it's to grip the imagination and stay readable, has to have, as well as those external formal features, the same dynamo of hidden musical dramatic laws as the apparently free verse.

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What happens in the heart simply happens.

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I think the real fascination of fishing to me is certainly more than just fish. It's something to do with the whole world... of your reaction to, your response to water and things living in water, the fascination of flowing water and living things coming up out of it - to grab at you and be grabbed.

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With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,...

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Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. - Engrved on Statue of Liberty

more quotes from Emma Lazarus

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame, With conquering limbs astride from land to land; Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame. "Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

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To begin with, I wanted that truth to life to possess a concrete reliability, and rejoiced most when the poem seemed most direct, an upfront representation of the world it stood in for or stood up for or stood its ground against.

more quotes from Seamus Justin Heaney

In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself.

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There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you.

more quotes from Seamus Justin Heaney

The external reality and inner dynamic of happenings in Northern Ireland between 1968 and 1974 were symptomatic of change, violent change admittedly, but change nevertheless, and for the minority living there, change had been long overdue.

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But even so, none of the news of these world-spasms entered me as terror.

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