Basil Bunting Quotes

Sooner or later we must absorb Islam if our own culture is not to die of anemia.

Always carry a corkscrew and the wine shall provide itself.

Men are fools to invest in real estate.

Compose aloud: poetry is a sound. Never explain- your reader is as smart as you. Your reader is not just any reader, but is the rare one with ears in his head.

Can a moment of madness make up for an age of consent?

But their determination to banish fools foundered ultimately in the installation of absolute idiots.

To appreciate present conditions, collate them with those of antiquity.

Our doom is, to be sifted by the wind, heaped up, smoothed down like silly sands. We are less permanent than thought.

Name and date split in soft slate a few months obliterate. 166

Praise the green earth. Chance has appointed her home, workshop, larder, middenpit. Her lousy skin scabbed here and there by cities provides us with name and nation.

Prose exists to convey meaning, and no meaning such as prose conveys can be expressed as well in poetry. That's not poetry's purpose.

The times are squalid. They always were. It is a poet's duty to hold the line.