Basil Bunting Quotes
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To appreciate present conditions, collate them with those of antiquity.
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Whether you listen to a piece of music, or a poem, or look at a picture or a jug, or a piece of sculpture, what matters about it is not what it has in common with others of its kind, but what is singularly its own.
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Can a moment of madness make up for an age of consent?
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The mystic purchases a moment of exhilaration with a lifetime of confusion; and the confusion is infectious and destructive. It is confusing and destructive to try and explain anything in terms of anything else, poetry in terms of psychology.
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Always carry a corkscrew and the wine shall provide itself.
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He whom we anatomized‘whose words we gathered as pleasant flowersand thought on his wit and how neatly he described things’speaksto us, hatching marrow,broody all night over the bones of a deadman.
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The sea has no renewal, no forgetting,no variety of death,is silent with the silence of a single note.
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Then he saw his ghosts glitter with golden hands,the Emperor sliding up and up from his tombalongside Charles. These things are not obliterate.White gobs spitten for mockery;and I too shall have CY GIST, written over me.
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Gin the goodwife stintand the bairns hungerthe Duke can get his rentone year longer.
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Compose aloud: poetry is a sound.
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Mine was a threeplank bed whereonI lay and cursed the weary sun.They took away the prison clothesand on the frosty nights I froze.I had a Bible where I readthat Jesus came to raise the dead-I kept myself from going madby singing an old bawdy balladand birds sang on my windowsilland tortured me till I was ill
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Poetry? It's a hobby.I run model trains.Mr Shaw there breeds pigeons.It's not work. You don't sweat.Nobody pays for it.You could advertise soap.
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Remember, imbeciles and wits,sots and ascetics, fair and foul,young girls with little tender tits,that DEATH is written over all.Worn hides that scarcely clothe the soulthey are so rotten, old and thin,or firm and soft and warm and full-fellmonger Death gets every skin.