“I don't always understand poetry!''You don't always understand it? Timms, I never understand it. But learn it now, know it now and you will understand it...whenever.”

“TIMMS: I don't see how we can understand it. Most of the stuff poetry's about hasn't happened to us yet.HECTOR: But it will, Timms. It will. And then you will have the antidote ready! Grief. Happiness. Even when you're dying. We're making your deathbeds here, boys.LOCKWOOD: Fucking Ada.HECTOR: Poetry is the trailer! Forthcoming attractions!”

“HEADMASTER: I was a geographer. I went to Hull.IRWIN: Oh. Larkin.HEADMASTER: Everybody says that. 'Hull? Oh, Larkin.' I don't know about the poetry...as I say, I was a geographer...but as a librarian he was pitiless. The Himmler of the Accessions Desk. And now, we're told, women in droves. Art. They get away with murder.”

“You don't put your life into your books, you find it there.”

“Sometimes there is no next time, no time-outs, no second chances. Sometimes it’s now or never.”

“The best moments in reading are when you come across something – a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things – which you had thought special and particular to you. Now here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out and taken yours.”

“...But what is it all about, what am I trying to do, is there a message? Nobody knows, and I certainly don't. If one could answer these questions in any other way than by writing what one has written, then there would be no point in writing at all.”