Craig Raine Quotes

Craig Raine's verses feel oddly grand, mixing strange birds and haunted machines for readers who love surreal, vivid imagery.

17 quotes

Caxtons are mechanical birds with many wings And some are treasured for their markings - They cause the eyes to melt Or the body to shriek without pain.

#1
In homes, a haunted apparatus sleeps, That snores when you pick it up. If the ghost cries, they carry it To their lips and soothe it to sleep With sounds. And yet, they wake it up Deliberately, by tickling with a finger.

#2
The task of the artist at any time is uncompromisingly simple - to discover what has not yet been done, and to do it.

#3
Great writers arrive among us like new diseases - threatening, powerful, impatient for patients to pick up their virus, irresistible.

#4
I used to carry a copy of Ulysses with me everywhere just in case I was knocked down by a bus. It seemed more important than having clean underwear.

#5
“In his autobiography Stravinsky relates that the first music he remembers was made by a peasant, working his hand in his armpit to produce a rhytmic farting.”
“Friendship is one friend betraying another friend to a third friend. With a fond friendly smile. The greater the betrayal, the greater the intimacy - the greater the friendship.”
“When Julia was twenty-nine, her hair was already bar-coded. Now, at sixty-two, it was a solid helmet of bright pewter, level with her lean, brown jawbone.”
“I am awaiting the return of the nerves to the epidermis. They're being pretty damn slow about it.”
“It was like being trapped forever in the present tense of the first line of a first reader.”
“Here she is at her kitchen table, fingering a jigsaw of thalidomide ginger, thinking about the arthritis in her hands.”
“In the morning, when she walked to the consulate, carefully watching her sandals on the pavement, she glanced up and saw a Negro wearing a stack of panama hats. Maybe twelve. She never forgot the bandoeon of brims, the perfect stutter of hat.”
“Her laugh. The way she smoked before she gave up. Smoke trickling up her nostrils. Spokes of smoke when she spoke.”
“...much of poetry in the making is the fiddle with a few items. You lay a word against another and wait. You try another word. And another. Yet another. You wait. You begin again. Listening. Looking. For the elusive inevitable thing which has to arrive before it is recognised. And, like Odysseus, may not be recognised at first.”
“The jery, impeded walk of a man stuck in a turnstile, admitted, and stuck in a turnstile, admitted, and stuck in a turnstile. He said it was rheumatoid arthritis. It looked as likely to be cancer of the prostrate metastatising to his hips.”
“Begin with the soft smelted upturned heart-shaped mouth made for smiling a smile kept for kindness, tenderness, incapable of malice. Am I going too fast for you? The almond eyes see out through their sleepy epicanthic fold. Trusting and calm, if a flicker from slowness, a further flicker from stupidity. Settled in slow-motion beauty, heart-breaking beauty.”
“He was making music - Howells, Finzi, Holst - so you could see the sounds in the serried air. Serried. Then just as suddenly empty when his sound-proof right hand closed off the notes.”