1. Quotes
  2. Authors
  3. Carol Ann Duffy

Carol Ann Duffy Quotes

Dame Carol Ann Duffy is a British poet and playwright. She is a professor of contemporary poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University, and was appointed Britain's Poet Laureate in May 2009, resigning in 2019. She was the first woman, the first Scottish-born poet, and the first LGBT poet to hold the position.Her collections include Standing Female Nude , winner of a Scottish Arts Council Award; Selling Manhattan , which won a Somerset Maugham Award; Mean Time , which won the Whitbread Poetry Award; and Rapture , winner of the T. S. Eliot Prize. Her poems address issues such as oppression, gender, and violence in an accessible language that has made them popular in schools.



Wikipedia  

✵ 23. December 1955
Carol Ann Duffy photo

Works

The World's Wife
The World's Wife
Carol Ann Duffy
The World's Wife
The World's Wife
Carol Ann Duffy
Carol Ann Duffy: 15 quotes0 likes

Famous Carol Ann Duffy Quotes

“I like to use simple words, but in a complicated way.”

Carol Ann Duffy

“I'm not the first or the last
to stand on a hillock,
watching the man she married
prove to the world
he's a total, utter, absolute, Grade A pillock.”

Carol Ann Duffy book The World's Wife

Source: The World's Wife

“The stars are filming us for no one.”

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

Shooting Stars.
Standing Female Nude (1985)

“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

Interviewed in The Guardian, December 4, 2005.

Carol Ann Duffy Quotes about light

“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

Interviewed in The Guardian, December 4, 2005. http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2005/dec/04/poetry.features

“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

Valentine, from Mean Time (1993).

“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 Light Gatherer, from Feminine Gospels (2002).

Carol Ann Duffy Quotes

“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

Talent.
Standing Female Nude (1985)

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

Carol Ann Duffy

Over, from Rapture (2005).

“Here.
It will blind you with tears
like a lover.
It will make your reflection
a wobbling photo of grief.”

Carol Ann Duffy

Valentine, from Mean Time (1993).

“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

Interviewed in The Guardian http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2002/aug/31/featuresreviews.guardianreview8, August 31, 2002.

“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

Death and the Moon, from Feminine Gospels (2002).

“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

Words, Wide Night, from The Other Country (1990).

Similar authors

Arthur Conan Doyle photo
Arthur Conan Doyle166
Scottish physician and author None
Kazuo Ishiguro photo
Kazuo Ishiguro76
Japanese-born British author None
Naguib Mahfouz photo
Naguib Mahfouz7
Egyptian writer None
Stanisław Jerzy Lec photo
Stanisław Jerzy Lec28
Polish writer None
John Ronald Reuel Tolkien photo
John Ronald Reuel Tolkien78
British philologist and author, creator of classic fantasy … None
A.A. Milne photo
A.A. Milne169
British author None
Italo Calvino photo
Italo Calvino44
Italian journalist and writer of short stories and novels None
Doris Lessing photo
Doris Lessing94
British novelist, poet, playwright, librettist, biographer … None
Richard Aldington photo
Richard Aldington5
English writer and poet None
Juan Ramón Jimenéz photo
Juan Ramón Jimenéz18
Spanish poet None