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

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" I have begun to think of life as a series of ripples widening out from an original center. "

" History says, 'Don't hope on this side of the grave.' "

" The end of art is peace. "

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

" I always had a superstitious fear of setting up a too well-designed writing place and then finding that the writing had absconded. "

" The kinds of truth that art gives us many, many times are small truths. They don't have the resonance of an encyclical from the Pope stating an eternal truth, but they partake of the quality of eternity. There is a sort of timeless delight in them. "

" I have always thought of poems as stepping stones in one's own sense of oneself. Every now and again, you write a poem that gives you self-respect and steadies your going a little bit farther out in the stream. At the same time, you have to conjure the next stepping stone because the stream, we hope, keeps flowing. "

" Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained. "

" I don't think my intelligence is naturally analytic or political. "

" Manifesting that order of poetry where we can at last grow up to that which we stored up as we grew. "

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

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

" One doesn't want one's identity coerced. "

" 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. "

" I'm not personally obsessed with death. At a certain age, the light that you live in is inhabited by the shades - it 'tis. "

" It is very true to say that work done by writers is quite often an attempt to give solid expression to that which is bothering them... They feel they have got it right if they express the stress. "

" In the United States, in poetry workshops, it's now quite a thing to make graduate students learn poems by heart. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" But that citizen's perception was also at one with the truth in recognizing that the very brutality of the means by which the IRA were pursuing change was destructive of the trust upon which new possibilities would have to be based. "

" I suppose you inevitably fall into habits of expression. "

" You can have Irish identity in the north and also have your Irish passport. "

" Poetry is more a threshold than a path. "

" Whether it be a matter of personal relations within a marriage or political initiatives within a peace process, there is no sure-fire do-it-yourself kit. "

" I've been in the habit of helping people. "

" A person from Northern Ireland is naturally cautious. "

" Yeats was 18th-century oratory, almost. "

" We go to poetry, we go to literature in general, to be forwarded within ourselves. "