Then as the years went on and my listening became more deliberate, I would climb up on an arm of our big sofa to get my ear closer to the wireless speaker.
Category Archive: Irish
Yeats, protected to some extent by the Nationalistic movement, wrote out of a somewhat protected world, and so his work does not touch life deeply.
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.
Here bring your wounded hearts, here tell your anguish; Earth has no sorrow that Heaven cannot heal.
Others indeed may talk, and write, and fight about liberty, and make an outward pretence to it; but the free-thinker alone is truly free.
Truth is the cry of all, but the game of few.
In my early teens, I acquired a kind of representative status: went on behalf of the family to wakes and funerals and so on. And I would be counted on as an adult contributor when it came to farm work – the hay in the summertime, for example.
Letting the facts speak for themselves is an immoral principle when we all know that facts and figures can be selected to prove anything.
Chaos is the first condition. Order is the first law. Continuity is the first reflection. Quietude is the first happiness.
Of the things which nourish the imagination, humour is one of the most needful, and it is dangerous to limit or destroy it.