Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

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

Related Quotes:

" The experimental poetry thing is not my thing. It's a programme of the avant-garde: basically a refusal of the kind of poetry I write. "

" My point is there's a hidden Scotland in anyone who speaks the Northern Ireland speech. It's a terrific complicating factor, not just in Northern Ireland, but Ireland generally. "

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

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

" 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. "

" Anyone born and bred in Northern Ireland can't be too optimistic. "

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

" The Heaneys were aristocrats, in the sense that they took for granted a code of behavior that was given and unspoken. Argumentation, persuasion, speech itself, for God's sake, just seemed otiose and superfluous to 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. "

" Poetry is what we do to break bread with the dead. "

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

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

" The gift of writing is to be self-forgetful, to get a surge of inner life or inner supply or unexpected sense of empowerment, to be afloat, to be out of yourself. "

" Loyalism, or Unionism, or Protestantism, or whatever you want to call it, in Northern Ireland - it operates not as a class system, but a caste system. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" You yourself don't have to be shaken by mortal danger in order to feel your mortality. "

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

" I've said it before about the Nobel Prize: it's like being struck by a more or less benign avalanche. It was unexpected, unlooked for, and extraordinary. "

" Write whatever you like! "

" In a way, Anglo-Saxon poetry cannot be translated. "

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

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

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

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

" There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you. "

" The murder of Sean Brown hurt my soul. "

" My passport's green. "

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

" 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. "