Carol Ann Duffy Quotes

22 Sourced Quotes

I don't like poets to be like priests, as though you were hearing the Mass: I know where that's coming from because I went to Mass as a child.

Carol Ann Duffy
The words you spoke were frenzied prayers to chemistry..

Carol Ann Duffy
There'll be what you might call a moment of inspiration – a way of seeing or feeling or remembering, an instance or a person that's made a large impression. 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
Somewhere on the other side of this wide night
and the distance between us, I am thinking of you.
The room is turning slowly away from the moon.

Carol Ann Duffy
The beginning of a poem is always a moment of tiny revelation, a new way of seeing something, which almost simultaneously attracts language to it.

Carol Ann Duffy
Because the Badgers are moving the goalposts.
The Ferrets are bending the rules.
The Weasels are taking the hindmost.
The Otters are downing tools.
The Hedgehogs are changing the game-plan.
The Grass-snakes are spitting tacks.
The Squirrels are playing the blame-game
The Skunks are twisting the facts.

Carol Ann Duffy
This is the word tightrope. Now imagine
a man, inching across it in the space
between our thoughts. He holds our breath. There is no word net. You want him to fall, don't you?
I guessed as much; he teeters but succeeds.
The word applause is written all over him.

Carol Ann Duffy
You have me like a drawing, erased, coloured in, untitled, signed by your tongue.

Carol Ann Duffy
Time hates love, wants love poor,/but love spins gold, gold, gold from straw.

Carol Ann Duffy
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
What do I have
to help me, without spell or prayer,
endure this hour, endless, heartless, anonymous,
the death of love?

Carol Ann Duffy
Not a red rose or a satin heart.
I give you an onion.
It is a moon wrapped in brown paper.
It promises light
like the careful undressing of love... I am trying to be truthful.

Carol Ann Duffy
Some nights, although we are faithless, the truth
enters our hearts, that small familiar pain;
then a man will stand stock-still, hearing his youth
in the distant Latin chanting of a train.

Carol Ann Duffy
Whatever 'in love' means,
true love is talented.

Carol Ann Duffy
Six hours like this for a few francs.
Belly nipple arse in the window light,
he drains the colour from me. Further to the right,
Madame. And do try to be still.
I shall be represented analytically and hung
in great museums. The bourgeoisie will coo
at such an image of a river-whore. They call it Art.

Carol Ann Duffy
One saw I was alive. Loosened
his belt. My bowels opened in a ragged gape of fear.
Between the gap of corpses I could see a child.
The soldiers laughed. Only a matter of days separate
this from acts of torture now. They shot her in the eye.

Carol Ann Duffy
Here.
It will blind you with tears
like a lover.
It will make your reflection
a wobbling photo of grief.

Carol Ann Duffy
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
I cannot say where you are. Unreachable
by prayer, even if poems are prayers. Unseeable
in the air, even if souls are stars.

Carol Ann Duffy
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
Light gatherer. You fell from a star
into my lap, the soft lamp at the bedside
mirrored in you,
and now you shine like a snowgirl,
a buttercup under a chin, the wide blue yonder
you squeal at and fly in.

Carol Ann Duffy
The dead are so talented.
The living walk by the edge of a vast lake
near the wise, drowned silence of the dead.

Carol Ann Duffy