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" I am 33 years old, and what can I have been doing that I still am in a muddle? But everyone else is, too; maybe our muddles are concurrent. "
Louis MacNeice
Still
Doing
Everyone
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" Before I joined the BBC I was, like most of the intelligentsia, prejudiced not only against that institution but against broadcasting in general. "
Louis MacNeice
Most
Before
Against
" A poet should always be 'collaborating' with his public, but this public, in the mass, cannot make itself heard, and he has to guess at its requirements and its criticisms. "
Louis MacNeice
Poet
Always
Cannot
" The individualist is an atom thinking about himself (Thank God I am not as other men); the communist, too often, is an atom having ecstasies of self-denial (Thank God I am one in a crowd). "
Louis MacNeice
Men
Thinking
Thank God
" Good poets have written in order to describe something or to preach something - with their eye on the object or the end. The essence of the poetry does not lie in the thing described or in the message imparted but in the resulting concrete unity, the poem. "
Louis MacNeice
Unity
Lie
Good
" I am at home in Dublin, more than in any other city. "
Louis MacNeice
Than
More
I Am
" I am more proud of what distinguishes man from the animals than of what he has in common with them. "
Louis MacNeice
I Am
Proud
More
" When I went to bed as a child, I was told, 'You don't know where you'll wake up.' When I ran in the garden, I was told that running was bad for the heart. Everything had its sinister aspect - milk shrinks the stomach, lemon thins the blood. "
Louis MacNeice
Child
Garden
You
" The rules or 'laws' of poetry are only tentative devices, an approximate scheme. There is no Sinaitic recipe for poetry, for the individual poem is the norm. "
Louis MacNeice
Laws
Individual
Rules
" Though I do regard the Inquisition in general and the burning of Giordano Bruno in particular as blots on the history of the Roman Catholic Church, I am far from being actuated by hatred of that church, and in fact cannot imagine that European civilization would have developed or survived without it. "
Louis MacNeice
History
Hatred
Church
" Let them not make me a stone and let them not spill me, otherwise kill me. "
Louis MacNeice
Stone
Me
Otherwise
" The teapot takes in water and gives out tea. So the human individual takes in anything you give him and promptly transforms it; he is ready to give you out again his own reactions - first, in thought and emotion, then in voice or action. "
Louis MacNeice
Voice
Water
Action
" My stepmother appeared when I was about 9. My brother was sent off to an institute in Scotland & my sister & I were sent to school. As my stepmother's ideas were then wholly Quaker, mixed with a naive & charming innocence & a little snobbery, it was one dotty epoch on top of another. I always remained terrified of my father. "
Louis MacNeice
Brother
School
Ideas
" It is a retrogression when human beings begin to insist on uniform, on one-mindedness, on conditioning their offspring so that all their reactions are automatic. "
Louis MacNeice
Uniform
Begin
Human Beings
" We are all fed from hundreds and thousands of hands. Often we do not know whose they are nor how they work. Only a few of us ever visualize the hands that grope in the coal mines or push levers in the mills or handle axes in the lumber camp. "
Louis MacNeice
Handle
Hands
Know
" My birth was managed so rottenly that my mother had eventually to have a hysterectomy, after which she was ill off & on till she dies for obscure reasons when I was just 7. "
Louis MacNeice
Just
Birth
Mother
" I do not envy any animal, though I envy many of their capacities. "
Louis MacNeice
Many
Envy
Though
" Mysticism, in the narrow sense, implies a specific experience which is foreign to most poets and most men, but on the other hand, it represents an instinct which is a human sine qua non. "
Louis MacNeice
Men
Experience
Hand
" I am not yet born; O fill me with strength against those who would freeze my humanity. "
Louis MacNeice
Me
I Am
Humanity
" As things may turn out in the future, people may (though I doubt it) find that their work gives them all the enjoyment - physical, intellectual or aesthetic - which they may require. That certainly is not so now. "
Louis MacNeice
Future
Doubt
Aesthetic
" Everyone is not able, or inclined, to write poetry in the narrower sense any more than everyone is qualified to take part in a walking race. But just as all of us can and do walk, so all of us can and do use language poetically. "
Louis MacNeice
Poetry
Language
Race
" Style without content is bad style. "
Louis MacNeice
Bad
Content
Style
" In writing 'A Portrait of Athens' I have attempted - rather impressionistically - to give a panorama of its present. But I have also brought in its past because I sincerely think that there is a continuity. "
Louis MacNeice
Think
Present
Portrait
" Man is an unhappy animal and one that can talk. If he was not unhappy, he would have nothing to talk about. But if he had nothing to talk about, he would be unhappy. "
Louis MacNeice
Animal
Unhappy
Nothing
" A harrassed and dubious childhood under the hand of a well-meaning but barbarous mother's help from County Armagh led me to think of the North of Ireland as prison and the South as a land of escape. "
Louis MacNeice
Me
Think
Land
" Democracy - or any improvement on it - will rest on the layman's right to criticize. His criticism will be often - very often - damn silly, but if, like Plato and the Fascists, we take away his right to criticize, we take away his right to appreciate. "
Louis MacNeice
Rest
Improvement
Democracy
" Wyndham Lewis is basically a pessimist, thinking of human beings as doomed animals or determinist machines. His theory of satire is based on this view, and he finds plenty of evidence to support it in contemporary practice. "
Louis MacNeice
Animals
Support
Practice
" My sympathies are Left. On paper and in the soul. But not in my heart or my guts. "
Louis MacNeice
Paper
Left
Soul
" All the people I know have been conditioned by snobbery. "
Louis MacNeice
Been
Snobbery
People
" I would have a poet able bodied, fond of talking, a reader of the newspapers, capable of pity and laughter, informed in economics, appreciative of women, involved in personal relationships, actively interested in politics, susceptible to physical impressions. "
Louis MacNeice
Economics
Politics
Laughter
" All experiment is made on a basis of tradition; all tradition is the crystallization of experiment. "
Louis MacNeice
Experiment
Made
Basis