Muldoon Quotes & Sayings

Living at that pitch, on that edge, is something which many poets engage in to some extent. — Paul Muldoon

Last year I was a judge for a prize in England, the T.S. Eliot Prize, so I read everything that was published in England last year. — Paul Muldoon

He'd never played in Wrigley Field - the Cubs had still been out at old West Side Grounds when he came through as a catcher for the Cardinals before the First World War. But seeing the ballpark in ruins brought the reality of this war home to him like a kick in the teeth. Sometimes big things would do that, sometimes little ones; he remembered a doughboy breaking down and sobbing like a baby when he found some French kid's dolly with its head blown off. Muldoon's eyes slid over toward Wrigley for a moment. "Gonna be a long time before the Cubs win another pennant," he said, as good an epitaph as any for the park - and the city. — Harry Turtledove

Owning land, he mused, being responsible for it. Plowing, planting, tending, watching things grow. Keeping an eye on the sky, sniffing the air for a turn in the weather. Not a life for Grayson Thane, he thought, but imagined some would find it rewarding. There'd been that simple pride of ownership in Murphy Muldoon's walk - a man who knew his feet were planted on his own. — Nora Roberts

That's one of the great things about poetry; one realises that one does one's little turn - that you're just part of the great crop, as it were. — Paul Muldoon

The ground swell is what's going to sink you as well as being what buoys you up. These are cliches also, of course, and I'm sometimes interested in how much one can get away with. — Paul Muldoon

If the poem has no obvious destination, there's a chance that we'll be all setting off on an interesting ride. — Paul Muldoon

I love the image of the Holy Spirit enfolding the world in her wings, caring for it the way that a mother holds her baby close. — Tim Muldoon

I suppose for whatever reason I actively welcome being put down, something which perhaps goes back to my upbringing - that accusation of not being worthy which could be laid at one's door. — Paul Muldoon

On the other hand, at some level the mass of unresolved issues in Northern Ireland does influence the fact that there are so many good writers in the place. — Paul Muldoon

I was born in Northern Ireland in 1951. I lived most of my life there until 1986 or 1987. — Paul Muldoon

Words want to find chimes with each other, things want to connect. — Paul Muldoon

But one look at Wildcard's face, and he knew there was trouble.
Problem? he signaled.
Wildcard responded with an obscene gesture that more than conveyed his opinion that not only was this a problem, but it was a big problem.
...
"Okay". That was not anywhere near the complete reaming Muldoon imagined "We'll take a different route down."
"We could", Wildcard agreed. "But they've got a prisoner.."
Oh man, that hurt. Dream op to nightmare ... Muldoon gritted his teeth and considered his options.
"Holy fuck", Wildcard said. "When I tell you that a stupid ass French photog is going to turn this perfect op into a total clusterfuck, what you say sir, is 'Oh, holy fuck'. If this isn't the time to use your full adult vocabulary, Lieutenant, I honestly don't know what is". — Suzanne Brockmann

Confusion is what we're living with - not being able to make sense of what's happening to us from day to day. Whereas making sense is what we're aiming for - making sense. — Paul Muldoon

Your average pop song or film is a very sophisticated item, with very sophisticated ways of listening and viewing that we have not really consciously developed over the years - because we were having such a good time. — Paul Muldoon

It's not as if I'm trying to write crossword puzzles to which one might find an answer at the back of the book or anything like that. — Paul Muldoon

Still holding me close, she whispered into my ear, "But you know what, Soph? Italy is my destiny; it calls to me to return home. — Melissa Muldoon

One will never again look at a birch tree, after the Robert Frost poem, in exactly the same way. — Paul Muldoon

And nobody knows where her new dorm room is - or even if she has one." She shook her head. "It's a mystery. — Shana Muldoon Zappa

In order to grow
you have to let go
of all that you are
and all that you know. — Maureen Rose Muldoon

Mrs. Muldoon walks down the line, handing out the most beautiful bouquets I have ever seen. Like the ones that brides carry. Dark red ribbons that wind around the stems like a barbershop light pole. Ribbons dangle from the bottom, too. She hands my bunch to me, and I smile thinking of how much my mom will love to see me with them. Keisha — Lynda Mullaly Hunt

I believe that these devices like repetition and rhyme are not artificial, that they're not imposed, somehow, on the language. — Paul Muldoon

It was so easy to get caught up in the day to day grind. In the little dramas of work, in the trips to the grocery store, in the hours of mindless vegging in front of the television. You could live your life that way, always caught up in the next thing. Always thinking of tomorrow, of your future, of the next paycheck. Never stopping to appreciate the moment you had now. Never stopping to appreciate the friends and family and love and laughter that existed in every single day of your life. Life could just pass you by like that, without you really noticing the good. And it was a shame if it did. It was a sin, if you let it go like that. — Meg Muldoon

We simply have not kept in touch with poetry. — Paul Muldoon

There's very little of the intentional about the business of writing poetry, as least as far as I can see. — Paul Muldoon

Of course, you can't legislate for how people are going to read. — Paul Muldoon

1. Total domination of the world by 1958.
2. Domination of the astral spheres quite soon too.
3. The finding of lovely ladies for Spotty Muldoon within the foreseeable future.
4. GETTING A NUCLEAR ARM to deter with.
5. The bodily removal from this planet of C. P. Snow and Alan Freeman and their replacement with fine TREES.
6. Stopping the GOVERNMENT from crawling up our pipes and listening to all we say.
7. Training BEES for uses against foreign powers, and so on.
8. Elimination of spindly insects and encouragement of lovely little newts who dance about and are happy.
9. E. L. Wisty for GOD. — Peter Cook

You might learn as much about how to write by reading Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Wallace Stevens, Raymond Chandler, Saul Bellow, Paul Muldoon or a hundred other good novelists or poets than by seeing another round of John Ford revivals. — David Denby

It seems to me the structure of the Quartets is too imposed. — Paul Muldoon

What I try to do is to go into a poem - and one writes them, of course, poem by poem - to go into each poem, first of all without having any sense whatsoever of where it's going to end up. — Paul Muldoon

I do a lot of readings. — Paul Muldoon

For whatever reason, people, including very well-educated people or people otherwise interested in reading, do not read poetry. — Paul Muldoon

He has come to lead me to that elusive place where promises take us and dreams carry us further. — Melissa Muldoon

He liked however the open shutters; he opened everywhere those Mrs. Muldoon had closed, closing them as carefully afterwards, so that she shouldn't notice: he liked
oh this he did like, and above all in the upper rooms!
the sense of the hard silver of the autumn stars through the window-panes, and scarcely less the flare of the street-lamps below, the white electric lustre which it would have taken curtains to keep out. This was human actual social; this was of the world he had lived in, and he was more at his ease certainly for the countenance, coldly general and impersonal, that all the while and in spite of his detachment it seemed to give him. — Henry James

Frost isn't exactly despised but not enough people have worked out what a brilliant poet he was. — Paul Muldoon

Now listen, we need to be quiet as mice. No, quieter than that. As quiet as ... as ... "
"Dead mice?" Reynie suggested.
"Perfect," said Kate with an approving nod. "As quiet as dead mice. — Trenton Lee Stewart

I'm sure 50 percent of television ads use rhyme. — Paul Muldoon

Why Brownlee left, and where he went,
Is a mystery even now.
For if a man should have been content
It was him; two acres of barley,
One of potatoes, four bullocks,
A milker, a slated farmhouse.
He was last seen going out to plough
On a March morning, bright and early.

By noon Brownlee was famous;
They had found all abandoned, with
The last rig unbroken, his pair of black
Horses, like man and wife,
Shifting their weight from foot to
Foot, and gazing into the future. — Paul Muldoon

Raptors are smart. Very smart. Believe me, all the problems we have so far are nothing compared with what we'd have if the raptors ever got out of their holding pen. — Robert Muldoon

All men are liars, said Roberta Muldoon, who knew this was true because she had once been a man. — John Irving

We hold these stories and mad idea and events in our head and they run around and around telling us we are different, separate, broken.
Then one day the mad idea escapes the asylum. Most times it's unplanned. It just tumbles out on the lap of the man sitting next to us on the bus, or it slips sideways into a conversation on line at the Trader Joe's or it falls out at the kitchen table when your neighbor comes to pick up her cat.
And there is a terrifying moment when it first hits the light of day, where we think, "holy mother of God! What have I done? How could I have been to casual with my crazy ways?"
But the man on the bus just smiles and nods his head, and the casher takes a moment to look us in the eye and the neighbor sits for a cup of tea and together we move into some new agreements that we are all in fact crazy and it's so much nicer to be out of the closet with it all. — Maureen Muldoon

Form is a straitjacket in the way that a straitjacket was a straitjacket for Houdini, — Paul Muldoon

New Zealand was colonised initially by those Australians who had the initiative to escape. — Robert Muldoon

Oh, the rare old Whale, mid storm and gale In his ocean home will be A giant in might, where might is right And King of the boundless sea - Whale Song — Robert Muldoon

I certainly am interested in accessibility, clarity, and immediacy. — Paul Muldoon

I live in New Jersey now, which always gets a bad rap here and there, but I must say, I enjoy living here too. — Paul Muldoon

Why, then, do you think the white player might have done it?"
Reynie considered. He imagined himself moving out his knight only to bring it right back to where it started. Why would he ever do such a thing? At last he said, "Perhaps because he doubted himself. — Trenton Lee Stewart

Obviously one of the things that poets from Northern Ireland and beyond - had to try to make sense of was what was happening on a day-to-day political level. — Paul Muldoon

She thought she could so she did. — Melissa Muldoon

I'm not some outdated alarm company, like Muldoon Security, singular. I'm offering a whole new variety of services, plural - water testing, soil graphs, toxic air readings, the security of this century. The security that you aren't being poisoned in your own home. — Christopher Bollen

New Zealanders who leave for Australia raise the IQ of both countries — Robert Muldoon

Reynie's fce fell. 'It's not funny, Kate.'
For a moment - a fleeting moment - Kate looked desperately sad. 'Well, of course it's not funny, Reynie Muldoon. But what do you want me to do? Cry? — Trenton Lee Stewart

I think the poetry that came out of Belfast, and especially the Queen's University set, in the 1970s and '80s - you know, Paul Muldoon and Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon and Ciaran Carson - that was probably the finest body of work since the Gaelic renaissance, up there with the work of Yeats and Synge and Lady Gregory. — Adrian McKinty

The group of writers I had grown up with in the '60s - Derek Mahon, Michael Longley, James Simmons, John Hewitt, Paul Muldoon - formed a very necessary and self-sustaining group. — Seamus Heaney

The point of poetry is to be acutely discomforting, to prod and provoke, to poke us in the eye, to punch us in the nose, to knock us off our feet, to take our breath away. — Paul Muldoon

Tell me," he demanded. "Tell me when. I'm going to come with you."
...
"Tell me," he ordered.
"I'm ... yes!" she said. "Yes!"
...
"Can you really do that/" she asked. "Come on command?"
Mike Muldoon, Navy SEAL, to Joan DaCosta — Suzanne Brockmann

The other side of it is that, despite all that, people reach out to poetry at the key moments in their lives. — Paul Muldoon