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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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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
Thinking
Occur
Somebody
Literature
Write
Doesn
Different
Writing
Think

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When modern writers gave up telling stories, they gave up the greatest thing we had.
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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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A teacher is a person who never says anything once.
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I would talk in iambic pentameter if it were easier.
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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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History is where tensions were.
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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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When I was starting to write, the great influence was T.S. Eliot and after that William Butler Yeats.
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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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I like all my children, even the squat and ugly ones.
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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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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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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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Why are stamps adorned with kings and presidents? That we may lick their hinder parts and thump their heads.
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This Constitutional Republic called America is an historic aberration. Any honest student of history will note that the prevailing socio-economic system is feudalism, where a tiny minority control the vast majority of wealth, power, and resources. In doing so, they have absolute control over the 99% of the population. Power equals control.
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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.
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Children, to be illustrious is sad.
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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've never read a political poem that's accomplished anything. Poetry makes things happen, but rarely what the poet wants.
Howard Nemerov