Top 61 Carol Ann Duffy Quotes
#1. Every day is a gift with a child, no matter what problems you have.
Carol Ann Duffy
#2. She stood upon a continent of ice, which sparkled between sea and sky, endless and dazzling, as though the world kept all its treasure there; a scale which balanced poetry and prayer.
Carol Ann Duffy
#4. Went to the Zoo, I said to Him- Something about that chimpanzee over there reminds me of you.
Carol Ann Duffy
#6. Better off dead than giving in; not taking what you want.
Carol Ann Duffy
#9. I'm not the first or the last
to stand on a hillock,
watching the man she married
prove to the world
he's a total, utter, absolute, Grade A pillock.
- Mrs Icarus
Carol Ann Duffy
#10. You have me like a drawing, erased, coloured in, untitled, signed by your tongue.
Carol Ann Duffy
#11. Love's language starts, stops, starts;
the right words flowing or clotting in the heart.
Carol Ann Duffy
#12. If I felt, in the event of a royal wedding, inspired to write about people coming together in marriage or civil partnership, I would just be grateful to have an idea for the poem. And if I didn't, I'd ignore it.
Carol Ann Duffy
#13. I always wanted a child. Being a mother is the central thing in my life.
Carol Ann Duffy
#14. The moment of inspiration can come from memory, or language, or the imagination, or experience - anything that makes an impression forcibly enough for language to form.
Carol Ann Duffy
#15. Auden said poetry makes nothing happen. But I wonder if the opposite could be true. It could make something happen.
Carol Ann Duffy
#16. Like the sand and the oyster, it's a creative irritant. In each poem, I'm trying to reveal a truth, so it can't have a fictional beginning.
Carol Ann Duffy
#17. I have piles of poetry books in the bathroom, on the stairs, everywhere. The only way to write poetry is to read it.
Carol Ann Duffy
#18. As anyone who has the slightest knowledge of my work knows, I have little in common with Larkin, who was tall, taciturn and thin-on-top, and unlike him I laugh, nay, sneer, in the face of death. I will concede one point: we are both lesbian poets.
Carol Ann Duffy
#19. The poem is the literary form of the 21st century. It's able to connect young people in a deep way to language ... it's language as play.
Carol Ann Duffy
#21. No jewel hold a candle to the cuckoo spit hung from the blade of grass at your ear. No chandelier see you better lit than here.
Carol Ann Duffy
#22. bees are the batteries of orchards, gardens, guard them.
Carol Ann Duffy
#24. Having a child takes you back to all those parts of your own childhood that you had hidden away.
Carol Ann Duffy
#25. A whole wall was crimson, gold, aglow with books
Words, words were truly alive on the tongue, in the head
Warm, beating, frantic, winged; music and blood.
Carol Ann Duffy
#26. It's always good when women win things in fiction because it tends to be more male-dominated, unlike poetry, which is more equal.
Carol Ann Duffy
#27. I think of him in certain lights, dawn, late afternoon,...
Carol Ann Duffy
#28. For me, poetry is the music of being human. And also a time machine by which we can travel to who we are and to who we will become.
Carol Ann Duffy
#30. You can find poetry in your everyday life, your memory, in what people say on the bus, in the news, or just what's in your heart.
Carol Ann Duffy
#31. I like pouring your tea, lifting
the heavy pot, and tipping it up,
so the fragrant liquid steams in your china cup.
Or when you're away or at work,
I like to think of your cupped hands as you sip,
as you sip, of the faint half-smile of your lips.
Carol Ann Duffy
#33. If poetry could truly tell it backwards, then it would.
Carol Ann Duffy
#34. But life, they said, means life. Dying inside.
The Devil was evil, mad, but I was the Devil's wife
which made me worse. I howled in my cell.
If the Devil is gone then how could this be hell?
Carol Ann Duffy
#35. I think poetry can help children deal with the other subjects on the curriculum by enabling them to see a subject in a new way.
Carol Ann Duffy
#36. How would you prepare to die on a perfect April evening?
Carol Ann Duffy
#37. I see the shape of the poem before I start writing, and the writing is just the process of arriving at the shape.
Carol Ann Duffy
#38. When you have a child, your previous life seems like someone else's. It's like living in a house and suddenly finding a room you didn't know was there, full of treasure and light.
Carol Ann Duffy
#39. Christmas is taken very seriously in this household. I believe in Father Christmas, and there's no way I'd do anything to undermine that belief.
Carol Ann Duffy
#40. Time hates love, wants love poor,/but love spins gold, gold, gold from straw.
Carol Ann Duffy
#42. I think the dangers are different now. Our abuse of the planet and our resources is an anxiety.
Carol Ann Duffy
#43. I took an axe
To a willow to see how it wept. I took an axe to a salmon
To see how it leapt. I took an axe to the wolf
As he slept.
Carol Ann Duffy
#44. The poem is a form of texting ... it's the original text. It's a perfecting of a feeling in language - it's a way of saying more with less, just as texting is.
Carol Ann Duffy
#45. What do I haveto help me, without spell or prayer,endure this hour, endless, heartless, anonymous,the death of love?
Carol Ann Duffy
#46. I write quite a lot of sonnets, and I think of them almost as prayers: short and memorable, something you can recite.
Carol Ann Duffy
#47. along with the rest of our helpless world; and, O, if you could, you would, where lovers walked, sell off trees and not give a flying fuck for the muted mausoleums of the bees.
Carol Ann Duffy
#48. It took ten years
In the woods to tell that a mushroom
Stoppers the mouth of a buried corpse, that birds
Are the uttered thought of trees, that a greying wolf
Howls the same old song at the moon, year in, year out
Season after season, same rhyme, same reason.
Carol Ann Duffy
#49. I write in that space between Ella's childhood and mine. I know it all sounds a bit sinister.
Carol Ann Duffy
#50. Edinburgh is my favourite city. We'll be doing a lot of children's theatre and galleries.
Carol Ann Duffy
#52. Poetry, above all, is a series of intense moments - its power is not in narrative. I'm not dealing with facts, I'm dealing with emotion.
Carol Ann Duffy
#53. If we think of what's up ahead, with climate change and wars over water, it's very frightening.
Carol Ann Duffy
#55. I still have a feeling that I haven't written the best that I can write. I think all poets must feel this: that there is constantly something new to be discovered in the language. It's like a thrilling encounter, and you can find things.
Carol Ann Duffy
#57. Poets deal in writing about feelings and trying to find the language and images for intense feelings.
Carol Ann Duffy
#58. Mrs Icarus
I'm not the first or the last
to stand on a hillock,
watching the man she married
prove to the world
he's a total, utter, absolute, Grade A pillock.
Carol Ann Duffy
#60. And here you come
with a shield for a heart
and a sword for a tongue
Carol Ann Duffy
#61. I always say that I'll have a go and see whether the poem works and if it does, then fine.
Carol Ann Duffy
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