Craig Raine Quotes

#1. Sylvia Plath is an example of the egotistical sublime: her subject is herself, her predicament, her violent Romantic emotions," wrote the poet Craig Raine.

Andrew Wilson

#2. Caxtons are mechanical birds with many wings And some are treasured for their markings - They cause the eyes to melt Or the body to shriek without pain.

Craig Raine

#3. Doubtless these are inconsequential perplexities. Still, inconsequential perplexities have now and again been known to become the fundamental mood of existence, one suspects.

David Markson

#4. If he didn't talk about it, maybe he would forget. He had never wanted to remember. It might not even be a true remembering." - Bran

George R R Martin

#5. In his autobiography Stravinsky relates that the first music he remembers was made by a peasant, working his hand in his armpit to produce a rhytmic farting.

Craig Raine

#6. God gave me a second chance. I am so very glad with what is going on with my career, but I want to be a success in my relationship with my children.

El DeBarge

#7. It was like being trapped forever in the present tense of the first line of a first reader.

Craig Raine

#8. I used to carry a copy of Ulysses with me everywhere just in case I was knocked down by a bus. It seemed more important than having clean underwear.

Craig Raine

#9. Her laugh. The way she smoked before she gave up. Smoke trickling up her nostrils. Spokes of smoke when she spoke.

Craig Raine

#10. I try to watch a movie a day, if not more, and through movies, I learned about so many different political themes I hadn't been interested in and cultural things I hadn't been aware of and economic factors I hadn't thought about.

Hideo Kojima

#11. I am awaiting the return of the nerves to the epidermis. They're being pretty damn slow about it.

Craig Raine

#12. ... When you've know me longer, you'll learn that I mean everything I say."
"Even the lies?"
"Especially the lies. Lord Petyr ...

George R R Martin

#13. Life is fundamentally up for grabs

Jonathan Lethem

#14. The jery, impeded walk of a man stuck in a turnstile, admitted, and stuck in a turnstile, admitted, and stuck in a turnstile. He said it was rheumatoid arthritis. It looked as likely to be cancer of the prostrate metastatising to his hips.

Craig Raine

#15. In the final analysis, the progress of our civilization will be retarded if any large body of citizens falls behind. Without the help of thousands of others, any one of us would die, naked and starved.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

#16. The task of the artist at any time is uncompromisingly simple - to discover what has not yet been done, and to do it.

Craig Raine

#17. He was making music - Howells, Finzi, Holst - so you could see the sounds in the serried air.
Serried. Then just as suddenly empty when his sound-proof right hand closed off the notes.

Craig Raine

#18. When Julia was twenty-nine, her hair was already bar-coded. Now, at sixty-two, it was a solid helmet of bright pewter, level with her lean, brown jawbone.

Craig Raine

#19. Friendship is one friend betraying another friend to a third friend. With a fond friendly smile. The greater the betrayal, the greater the intimacy - the greater the friendship.

Craig Raine

#20. Here she is at her kitchen table, fingering a jigsaw of thalidomide ginger, thinking about the arthritis in her hands.

Craig Raine

#21. In the morning, when she walked to the consulate, carefully watching her sandals on the pavement, she glanced up and saw a Negro wearing a stack of panama hats. Maybe twelve. She never forgot the bandoeon of brims, the perfect stutter of hat.

Craig Raine

#22. Great writers arrive among us like new diseases threatening, powerful, impatient for patients to pick up their virus, irresistible.

Craig Raine

#23. No one is exempt
and everyone's pain has a different smell.
At night, when all the colours die,
they hide in pairs
and read about themselves
in colour, with their eyelids shut.

Craig Raine