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However, I learned something. I thought that if the young person, the student, has poetry in him or her, to offer them help is like offering a propeller to a bird.

Norman MacCaig

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Norman MacCaig
Age: 85 †
Born: 1910
Born: November 14
Died: 1996
Died: January 23
Poet
Edinburgh
Scotland
Norman Alexander MacCaig
Help
Offer
Helping
Bird
Thought
Offers
Young
However
Persons
Students
Person
Poetry
Propeller
Something
Learned
Offering
Like
Literature
Student

More quotes by Norman MacCaig

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Anybody who writes doesn't like to be misunderstood.
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When I go fishing I like to know that there's nobody within five miles of me.
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And in a way, that's been a help to me, because I take great passions for a particular poet - sometimes it lasts for many years, sometimes only for a while. This happens to everybody.
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When I was asked to be Writer in Residence at Edinburgh I thought, you can't teach poetry. This is ridiculous.
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But you'd have a job to find many of my poems which would seem to be very influenced by a particular person.
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I was very interested in American poetry for many years. Much less now.
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There are some friends you don't meet for twenty years and when you meet them again it's as if no twenty years has happened - you're lucky when that happens. I feel the same about books.
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I used to fish the Border rivers, but nowadays you have to queue up for a shot and I can't stand that.
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And the second question, can poetry be taught? I didn't think so.
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I'm very gregarious, but I love being in the hills on my own.
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I don't care whether a book is a first edition or not. I'm not a bibliophile in that word's natural sense.
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I learned words, I learned words but half of them died from lack of exercise. And the ones I use often look at me with a look that whispers, Liar.
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I said I have no powers of invention. Well, I also have no powers of mimicry.
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Landscape is my religion. ...God in a green legend, I lean over the pool In a testament of leaves. I dangle my twinkling mood Before me in a cool cave roofed with branches And floored with a skin of water.
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I don't think of myself all the time.
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All I write about is what's happened to me and to people I know, and the better I know them, the more likely they are to be written about.
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If I wrote a play with four characters every single one of them would talk like me regardless of age or sex.
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And some poets are far better read off the page because they're very bad speakers. I'm thinking of one in particular whom I won't name, a good poet, and he reads in such a dry, boring way, your eyes start drooping.
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