Quote

The historian is terribly responsible to what he can discern are the facts of the case, but he's nothing if he doesn't make out a case.

Howard Nemerov

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Howard Nemerov
Age: 71 †
Born: 1920
Born: February 29
Died: 1991
Died: July 5
Essayist
Novelist
Poet
University Teacher
Writer
New York City
New York
Cases
Facts
Doesn
Nothing
Discern
Make
Terribly
Historian
Responsible
Case

More quotes by Howard Nemerov

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History is one of those marvelous and necessary illusions we have to deal with. It's one of the ways of dealing with our world with impossible generalities which we couldn't live without.
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I like all my children, even the squat and ugly ones.
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I think there's one thing which distinguishes our art - we don't consider. We don't think. We write a little verse because it comes to us.
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I am not at all clear what free verse is anymore. That's one of the things you learn not to know.
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Occasionally a student writer comes up with something really beautiful and moving, and you won't know for years if it was an accident or the first burst of something wonderful.
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Absolute power corrupts absolutely and if you surrender your personal responsibility to a government which promises to take care of you, they will only take care of themselves.
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[T]eaching has been for me an education (Lord knows what it has been for my students).
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Write what you know. That should leave you with a lot of free time.
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I've never read a political poem that's accomplished anything. Poetry makes things happen, but rarely what the poet wants.
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It may be said that poems are in one way like icebergs: only about a third of their bulk appears above the surface of the page.
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Why are stamps adorned with kings and presidents? That we may lick their hinder parts and thump their heads.
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When you write it doesn't occur to you that somebody could think different from what you do.
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I liked the kid who wrote me that he had to do a term paper on a modern poet and he was doing me because, though they say you have to read poems twice, he found he could handle mine in one try.
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Children, to be illustrious is sad.
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I think there was a revolution in poetry, associated chiefly with Eliot and Pound but maybe it is of the nature of revolutions or of the nature of history that their innovations should later come to look trivial or indistinguishable from technical tricks.
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Once in awhile you have a thought, and you rhyme it.
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That so much of our experience, or the stereotype which passes for it should be dealt with by means of the short story is perhaps a symptom not unnoticeable elsewhere in the public domain of an unlovely cynicism about human character.
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I sometimes talk about the making of a poem within the poem.
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I have a plot, but not much happens.
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The secrets of success are a good wife and a steady job. My wife told me.
Howard Nemerov