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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.

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
Beautiful
Student
Firsts
Accidents
First
Students
Something
Writer
Years
Wonderful
Really
Literature
Burst
Moving
Occasionally
Comes
Accident

More quotes by Howard Nemerov

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History is where tensions were.
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A teacher is a person who never says anything once.
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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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Children, to be illustrious is sad.
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Robert Frost had always said you mustn't think of the last line first, or it's only a fake poem, not a real one. I'm inclined to agree.
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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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[T]eaching has been for me an education (Lord knows what it has been for my students).
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I would talk in iambic pentameter if it were easier.
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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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Once in awhile you have a thought, and you rhyme it.
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I have a plot, but not much happens.
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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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Short stories amount for the most part to parlour tricks, party favours with built-in snappers, gadgets for including recognition and reversals
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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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When you write it doesn't occur to you that somebody could think different from what you do.
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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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When modern writers gave up telling stories, they gave up the greatest thing we had.
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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Write what you know. That should leave you with a lot of free time.
Howard Nemerov
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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.
Howard Nemerov