Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

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

Related Quotes:

" I've nothing against the Queen personally. I had lunch at the Palace once upon a time. "

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

" The group of writers I had grown up with in the '60s - Derek Mahon, Michael Longley, James Simmons, John Hewitt, Paul Muldoon - formed a very necessary and self-sustaining group. "

" 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. "

" Poetry is a domestic art, most itself when most at home. "

" My passport's green. "

" Eternal life can mean utter reverence for life itself. "

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

" Tom Sleigh's poetry is hard-earned and well founded. I great admire the way it refuses to cut emotional corners and yet achieves a sense of lyric absolution. "

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

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

" The end of art is peace. "

" I'm a firm believer in learning by heart. "

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

" What I've said before, only half in joke, is that everybody in Ireland is famous. Or, maybe better, say everybody is familiar. "

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

" Write whatever you like! "

" I would say that something important for me and for my generation in Northern Ireland was the 1947 Education Act, which allowed students who won scholarships to go on to secondary schools and thence to university. "

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

" If you go into an underground train in London - probably anywhere, but chiefly in London - there's that sense of almost entering a ghostly dimension. People are very still and quiet; they don't exchange many pleasantries. "

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

" I think of Dermot Healy as the heir to Patrick Kavanagh. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" I think of the bog as a feminine goddess-ridden ground, rather like the territory of Ireland itself. "

" The fact of the matter is that the most unexpected and miraculous thing in my life was the arrival in it of poetry itself - as a vocation and an elevation almost. "

" The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine. "

" 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. "