quotes from classic

It took me years to understand that words are often as important as experience, because words make experience last.

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Give me love and work - these two only.

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History has remembered the kings and warriors, because they destroyed; art has remembered the people, because they created.

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No man is good enough to be another's master.

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The true secret of happiness lies in taking a genuine interest in all the details of daily life.

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The past is not dead, it is living in us, and will be alive in the future which we are now helping to make.

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I wanted to reimagine the role, in a way that was respectful of its traditional responsibilities but made them part of a wider pattern of poetry about national incidents, events, preoccupations; and to spend a great deal of time going to schools trying to demystify poetry.

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I read 'Treasure Island' for the first time at university. And I started to notice then how unresolved some things were. Later, I realised that Stevenson was interested in sequels, and I wondered whether he would have gone back to it had he lived longer.

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I wish I'd been better able to resist the sense of obligation to write some of the poems I did. It's in the nature of commissioned work to be written too much from the side of your mind that knows what it's doing, which dries up the poetry.

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Those who say we should dismantle the role of Poet Laureate altogether, the trick they miss is that being called this thing, with the weight of tradition behind it, and with the association of the Royal family, does allow you to have conversations and to open doors, and wallets, for the good of poetry in a way that nothing else would allow.

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These places, and the ancient things you know, You won't know soon. I'm working on it now.'

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I've found a different way to scent the air: already it's a by-word for despair.

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The best public poems aren't necessarily those that go at the subject like a bull at a gate.

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I'm an early bird, partly because I like to have some quiet time and partly because by 9am emails begin arriving, the phone starts ringing and I have dragons to kill of one sort or another.

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Poetry is at the centre of my life, too, emotionally speaking, and intellectually speaking - it's just that I'm one of those people who enjoy doing other stuff as well.

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But Wordsworth is the poet I admire above all others.

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Each sudden gust of light explains itself as flames, but neither they, nor even bombs redoubled on the hills tonight can quite include me in their fear.

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I shall try to write a poem that is about the moment but doesn't betray things that are true to me as a poet.

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But in a lot of ways my poems are very conventional, and it's no big deal for me to write a poem in either free verse or strict form; modern poets can, and do, do both.

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In a fragile environment, we need to be aware of ourselves as members of a uniquely powerful species living among other species who are quite as interesting as we are but vulnerable to us because we are cleverer in more destructive ways.

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