Norman MacCaig

Poet

1910-11-14

Quotes by Norman MacCaig

• Scholars, I plead with you, Where are your dictionaries of the wind, the grasses?

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• Self under self, a pile of selves I standThreaded on time, and with metaphysic handLift the farm like a lid and seeFarm within farm, and in the centre, me.

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• Landscape is my religion....God in a green legend, I lean over the poolIn a testament of leaves. I dangle my twinkling mood Before me in a cool cave roofed with branchesAnd floored with a skin of water.

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• Scholars, I plead with you, Where are your dictionaries of the wind, the grasses?

  Read quote

• Self under self, a pile of selves I standThreaded on time, and with metaphysic handLift the farm like a lid and seeFarm within farm, and in the centre, me.

  Read quote

• Landscape is my religion....God in a green legend, I lean over the poolIn a testament of leaves. I dangle my twinkling mood Before me in a cool cave roofed with branchesAnd floored with a skin of water.

  Read quote

• 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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• A terrible thing about getting oldish is that your friends start dying, and in the last ten years I have lost seven or eight of my closest.

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• I used to have a great love for Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, the big boys of the last century.

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• Well, I'm a light traveller. I chuck things away.

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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.

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