Carol Ann Duffy Quotes

• In Mrs Tilscher's Class quotes


  - "You could travel up the Blue Nile with your finger"

  - "skittle of milk"

  - "A window opened with a long pole"

  - "laugh of a bell swung by a running child" vs "tangible alarm"

  - "inky tadpoles changed from commas into exclamation marks"

  - "Sugar paper. Coloured shapes. Brady and Hindley / faded, like the faint, uneasy smudge of a mistake."

  - "untidy, hot, fractious / under the heavy, sexy sky"

  - "Mrs Tilscher smiled / then turned away"

  - "the sky split open into a thunderstorm"
• Valentine quotes


  - "Not a red rose or a satin heart."

  - "I give you an onion. / It is a moon wrapped in brown paper."

  - "It will blind you with tears / like a lover."

  - "wobbling photo of grief."

  - "I am trying to be truthful."

  - "Not a cute card or a kissogram."

  - "Its fierce kiss will stay on your lips."

  - "possessive and faithful / as we are, / for as long as we are."

  - "Lethal. / Its scent will cling to your fingers, / cling to your knife."
• War Photographer quotes

  - "spools of suffering set out in ordered rows"

  - "Belfast. Beirut. Phnom Penh. All flesh is grass."

  - "As though this were a church and he a priest preparing to intone a Mass."

  - "his hands, which did not tremble then / though seem to now"

  - "ordinary pain"

  - "To fields which don't explode beneath the feet of running children in a nightmare heat."

  - "blood stained into foreign dust"

  - "The reader's eyeballs prick / with tears between the bath and pre-lunch beers."

  - "From the aeroplane"

  - "they do not care."
• Mrs Midas quotes


  - "The look on his face was strange, wild, vain"

  - "I poured with a shaking hand, / a fragrant, bone-dry white from Italy"

  - "It was then that I started to scream"

  - "Separate beds."

  - "I feared his honeyed embrace, / the kiss that would turn my lips to a work of art."

  - "I visited, odd times,/ parking the car a good way off"

  - "What gets me now is not the idiocy or greed / but lack of thought for me. Pure selfishness."

  - "I miss most, / even now, his hands, his warm hands on my skin, his touch."
• Originally quotes


  - "We came from our own country" vs "I want our own country"

  - "our mother singing / our father's name"

  - "All childhood is an emigration"

  - "Your accent wrong"

  - "My parents' anxiety stirred like a loose tooth / in my head"

  - "But then you forget, or don't recall, or change"

  - "seeing your brother swallow a slug, feel only a skelf of shame."

  - "I remember my tongue shedding its skin like a snake"

  - "Do I only think I lost a river, culture, speech, sense of first space and the right place?"

  - "And I hesitate."
• The Way My Mother Speaks quotes


  - "I say her phrases to myself / in my head"

  - "The day and ever. The day and ever."

  - "browsing for the right sky, / too blue swapped for a cool grey."

  - "The way I say things when I think."

  - "Nothing is silent. Nothing is not silent."

  - "I am happy and sad"

  - "a green, erotic pond."

  - "I am homesick, free, in love"