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[T]eaching has been for me an education (Lord knows what it has been for my students).

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
Education
Lord
Students

More quotes by Howard Nemerov

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The secrets of success are a good wife and a steady job. My wife told me.
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Shakespeare tells the same stories over and over in so many guises that it takes a long time before you notice.
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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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I sometimes talk about the making of a poem within the poem.
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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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Write what you know. That should leave you with a lot of free time.
Howard Nemerov
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A teacher is a person who never says anything once.
Howard Nemerov
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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.
Howard Nemerov
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Once in awhile you have a thought, and you rhyme it.
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.
Howard Nemerov
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The nice thing about the Bible is it doesn't give you too many facts. Two an a half lines and it tells you the whole story and that leaves you a great deal of freedom to elaborate on how it might have happened.
Howard Nemerov
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I have a plot, but not much happens.
Howard Nemerov
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When you write it doesn't occur to you that somebody could think different from what you do.
Howard Nemerov
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History is where tensions were.
Howard Nemerov
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When modern writers gave up telling stories, they gave up the greatest thing we had.
Howard Nemerov
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I like all my children, even the squat and ugly ones.
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I would talk in iambic pentameter if it were easier.
Howard Nemerov
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Why are stamps adorned with kings and presidents? That we may lick their hinder parts and thump their heads.
Howard Nemerov
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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.
Howard Nemerov
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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.
Howard Nemerov