"Hope is not optimism, which expects things to turn out well, but something rooted in the conviction that there is good worth working for."
"Debate doesn’t really change things. It gets you bogged in deeper. If you can address or reopen the subject with something new, something from a different angle, then there is some hope. ... People are suddenly gazing at something else and pausing for a moment. And for the duration of that gaze and pause, they are like reflectors of the totality of their own knowledge and/or ignorance. That’s something poetry can do for you, it can entrance you for a moment above the pool of your own consciousness and your own possibilities."
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Source: Seamus Heaney (2014). “Opened Ground: Selected Poems, 1966-1996”, p.437, Farrar, Straus and Giroux
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