Quote collection
113 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"I might enjoy being an albatross, being able to glide for days and daydream for hundreds of miles along the thermals. And then being able to hang like an affliction round some people's necks."
"Memory has always been fundamental for me. In fact, remembering what I had forgotten is the way most of the poems get started."
"Walk on air against your better judgement."
"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."
"No bit of the natural world is more valuable or more vulnerable than the tree bit. Nothing is more like ourselves, standing upright, caught between heaven and earth, frail at the extremities, yet strong at the central trunk, and nothing is closer to us at the beginning and at the end, providing the timber boards that frame both the cradle and the coffin."
"Suspect too much sweet talk but never close your mind."
"Once off the bush The fruit fermented, the sweet flesh would turn sour. I always felt like crying. It wasn't fair That all the lovely canfuls smelt of rot. Each year I hoped they'd keep, knew they would not. -Blackberry picking"
"Hope for a great sea-change timid to rebuke and too petty to forgive."
"It is difficult at times to repress the thought that history is about as instructive as an abattoir; that Tacitus was right and that peace is merely the desolation left behind after the decisive operations of merciless power."
"I've always associated the moment of writing with a moment of lift, of joy, of unexpected reward."
"The aim of poetry and the poet is finally to be of service, to ply the effort of the individual into the larger work of the community as a whole."
"The external reality and inner dynamic of happenings in Northern Ireland between 1968 and 1974 were symptomatic of change, violent change admittedly, but change nevertheless, and for the minority living there, change had been long overdue."
"I rhyme… to see myself, to set the darkness echoing."
"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 felt implicated in American affairs.Outraged at the blatant lies about Iraqs involvement in al Qaeda, at the regimes arrogance and stupidity, Guantnamo Bay and all the rest of it. But the poems at the start of District and Circle Anahorish 1944, The Aerodromearent particularly aimed as criticism. On the contrary, there's a recognition of the big contribution to world order made in Europe during World War II."
"Desmond O'Grady is one of the senior figures in Irish Literary life, exemplary in the way he has committed himself over the decades to the vocation of poetry and has lived selflessly for the art"
"On the contrary, a trust in the staying power and travel-worthiness of such good should encourage us to credit the possibility of a world where respect for the validity of every tradition will issue in the creation and maintenance of a salubrious political space."
"The next move is always the test."
"Without needing to be theoretically instructed, consciousness quickly realizes that it is the site of variously contending discourses."
"The whole relationship between a writer's spiritual/emotional condition and the kind of wordstuff and form-making that's going on in his work is an interesting one. When I was an undergraduate, there was a glib notion around that there was no reason to suppose a bad man could be a good writer."