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Quote by Ernie Chambers

“I will work hard to try to get rid of the death penalty. If I could do that, with all the other things I have not succeeded in doing, I would consider my political career to have been a resounding success.”

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Ernie Chambers

Ernie Chambers, born on July 10, 1937, is an individual whose identity and profession are not yet known. more

“I think everyone should understand history of segregation the same way we had to go to school and read about George Washington. I believe this generation should know their history and they should know that the struggle's not over yet. For instance, you can't get the cover of a magazine if your skin is too dark.”

Thinking Believe School I Believe Dark Skins Segregation

Author:Mary J. Blige

“Poetry is a way of being alone without feeling alone. It allows you to experience another mind, I suppose. And it does that more fully than other art forms, I think. It doesn't simply describe an experience, or a feeling, or a moment: it evokes it through, say, rhythm or tone or diction or metaphor. It creates a mood. A poem communicates before it is understood; it's not a fully paraphrasable form, which distinguishes it from other forms of writing.”

Thinking Writing Mind Art Moments Feelings Metaphor Communicate Mood Rhythm Poetry Is Feeling Alone

Author:Nick Laird

“Poetry is perhaps the oldest art form. We can go back to an age-old idea of naming things, the Adamic impulse - to give something a name has always been an immensely powerful thing. To name something is to own it, to capture it. A poem is still a kind of spell, an incantation. Historically, a poem also invoked: it was a blessing, or a curse, or a charm. It had a motile power, was able to summon something into being. A poem is a special kind of speech-act. In a good poem there's the trance-like effect of language in its most concentrated, naked form.”

Giving Kind Art Language Powerful Special Blessing Impulse Curse Poetry Is

Author:Nick Laird

“Writing a poem is a more personal experience, I think, than writing prose. And perhaps reading a poem is a more personal experience than reading prose, though that's harder to say.”

Thinking Writing Reading Prose

Author:Nick Laird

“Writing fiction, for me, is a more indirect form of self-exploration than writing verse. When I'm working on a novel I'm moving characters around and I'm thinking about plot and there's a lot of other things going on at the level of structure and story. With a poem, a single idea or line or emotion can sometimes be enough - there's often a sense, in the best poems, of capturing a single instant. Perhaps poems differ from prose in the degree of solace they can offer - by speaking so personally, so directly, about shared experience. A few lines of poetry can provide comfort.”

Thinking Writing Sometimes Enough Character Moving Emotion Novel Comfort Instant Prose Verses Solace Indirect

Author:Nick Laird

“Most of the poems I write go through forty versions and then stay in a file on my computer. I'm not very good at sending stuff out or feeling that something is ready to send out and I never have been. Part of the problem is that as soon as a poem is finished, it stops being all that interesting to me.”

Writing Feelings Problem Interesting Computer Very Good Forty

Author:Nick Laird

“If you grew up Protestant in Ireland, of course, at least in the twentieth century, there was always a contingent that would never really consider you Irish. Meanwhile in Britain you'd never quite be considered British. You fell into a gap in the definitions.”

Ireland Never Quit

Author:Nick Laird

“Now that the most interesting matter of identity is not what place someone was born in, but what point in time they are from - where they sit in relation to time. Age has become much more divisive than place. With the Internet and globalization, a twenty-year-old in New York has far more cultural references in common with a twenty-year-old in Nebraska than they do with a thirty-year-old who lives next door. National identity is what they trick you with when they want your feet in their army boots or your taxes in their bailouts.”

Age Interesting Common Identity Internet Taxes Army Relation Globalization Most Interesting

Author:Nick Laird

“With an age difference comes a great gap in cultural references, and so on. It's not all about race and gender. It interests me that, as you get older, your younger self becomes a stranger to you. A split occurs within yourself. But maybe we're all always strangers to ourselves.”

Age Interest Stranger Gender

Author:Nick Laird

“I think all writing is political. All writing shows a preoccupation with something, whatever that thing might be, and by putting pen to paper you are establishing a hierarchy of some sort - this emotion over that emotion, this memory over that memory, this thought over another. And isn't that process of establishing a hierarchy on the page a kind of political act?”

Thinking Writing Kind Political Memories Emotion Pens

Author:Nick Laird

Quote by Ernie Chambers

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