logo

Quotes from Carol Ann Duffy

And here you come with a shield for a heart and a sword for a tongue
~ Carol Ann Duffy
Words, words were truly alive on the tongue, in the head, warm, beating, frantic, winged; music and blood.
~ Carol Ann Duffy
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
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
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
I write in that space between Ella's childhood and mine. I know it all sounds a bit sinister.
~ Carol Ann Duffy
Auden said poetry makes nothing happen. But I wonder if the opposite could be true. It could make something happen.
~ Carol Ann Duffy
Poetry and prayer are very similar.
~ Carol Ann Duffy
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
I still read Donne, particularly his love poems.
~ Carol Ann Duffy
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
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
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
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
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
I grew up in a bookless house - my parents didn't read poetry, so if I hadn't had the chance to experience it at school I'd never have experienced it. But I loved English, and I was very lucky in that I had inspirational English teachers, Miss Scriven and Mr. Walker, and they liked us to learn poems by heart, which I found I loved doing.
~ Carol Ann Duffy
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
Poets sing our human music for us.
~ Carol Ann Duffy
Beauty is fame.
~ Carol Ann Duffy
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
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
Out of the forest I come with my flowers, singing, all alone.
~ Carol Ann Duffy
Then he started his period. One week in bed. Two doctors in. Three painkillers four times a day. And later a letter to the powers-that-be demanding full-paid menstrual leave twelve weeks per year.
~ Carol Ann Duffy
The Latin names of plants blur like belief.
~ Carol Ann Duffy