Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" I think childhood is, generally speaking, a preparation for disappointment. "

Related Quotes:

" The experiment of poetry, as far as I am concerned, happens when the poem carries you beyond where you could have reasonably expected to go. "

" My experience is that prose usually equals duty - last minute, overdue-deadline stuff or a panic lecture to be written. "

" If poetry and the arts do anything, they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness. "

" Nowadays, what an award gives is a sense of solidarity with the poetry guild, as it were: sustenance coming from the assent of your peers on the judging panel. "

" Even if the last move did not succeed, the inner command says move again. "

" A public expectation, it has to be said, not of poetry as such but of political positions variously approvable by mutually disapproving groups. "

" Poems that come swiftly are usually the ones that you keep. "

" Sonnet is about movement in a form. "

" I don't do as many readings as I used to. There was a time when I was on the road a lot more, at home in Ireland, in Britain, in Canada and the States, a time when I had more stamina and appetite for it. "

" In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself. "

" As writers and readers, as sinners and citizens, our realism and our aesthetic sense make us wary of crediting the positive note. "

" A person from Northern Ireland is naturally cautious. "

" I credit poetry for making this space-walk possible. "

" My father and mother had no sense of entitlement for their children. "

" I suppose you could say my father's world was Thomas Hardy and my mother's D.H. Lawrence. "

" Poetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to it. "

" When I first encountered the name of the city of Stockholm, I little thought that I would ever visit it, never mind end up being welcomed to it as a guest of the Swedish Academy and the Nobel Foundation. "

" I came from a farming background, and my career was teaching. "

" I always believed that whatever had to be written would somehow get itself written. "

" I'm very conscious that people dear to me are alive in my imagination - poets in particular. "

" The problem as you get older... is that you become more self-aware. At the same time, you have to surprise yourself. There's no way of arranging the surprise, so it is tricky. "

" Anybody serious about poetry knows how hard it is to achieve anything worthwhile in it. "

" In a war situation or where violence and injustice are prevalent, poetry is called upon to be something more than a thing of beauty. "

" At home in Ireland, there's a habit of avoidance, an ironical attitude towards the authority figure. "

" There's never going to be a united Ireland, you know. "

" Your temperament is what you write with, but it's also how you deal with the world. "

" Without needing to be theoretically instructed, consciousness quickly realizes that it is the site of variously contending discourses. "

" I think the first little jolt I got was reading Gerard Manley Hopkins - I liked other poems... but Hopkins was kind of electric for me - he changed the rules with speech, and the whole intensity of the language was there and so on. "

" My language and my sensibility are yearning to admit a kind of religious or transcendent dimension. But then there's the reality: there's no Heaven, no afterlife of the sort we were promised, and no personal God. "

" As a young poet, you need corroboration, and that's what publication does. "