Josephine Hart Quotes

Lucky people should hide. Pray the days of wrath do not visit their home.

Poetry contains almost all you need to know about life.

Poetry has never let me down. Without poetry, I would have found life less comprehensible, less bearable and infinitely less enjoyable.

The miraculous intimacy we shared did not have the time to generate into resentful emotional bondage

Always recognize the foces that will shape my life. I let them do their work. Sometimes they tear through my life like a hurricane. Sometimes they simply shift the ground under me, so that I stand on different earth, and something or someone has been swallowed up. I steady myself, in the earthquate. I lie down, and let the hurricane pass over me. I never fight. Afterwards I look around me, and I say, 'Ah, so this at least is left for me. And that dear person has also survived.' I quietly inscribe on the stone tablet of my heart the name which has gone forever. Th inscription is a thing of agony. Then I start on my way again.

They say that childhood forms us, that those early influences are the key to everything. Is the peace of the soul so easily won? Simply the inevitable result of a happy childhood. What makes childhood happy? Parental harmony? Good health? Security? Might not a happy childhood be the worst possible preparation for life? Like leading a lamb to the slaughter.

All damaged people are dangerous. Survival makes them so.' 'Why?' 'Because they have no pity. They know what others can survive, as they did.

The majority do not desire the world - knowing on some primitive level that it disappoints. They are quite content to let the blind few pursue their path to wisdom. And to watch those trapped by genius forced to sacrifice themselves, and those trapped by talent to emulate them. Much better to be in the audience, watching the actors find the surprise ending.

Warriors, in the ancient world, put their souls away for safe keeping during times of danger. I'd put mine away and didn't want strangers to search for it. I might lose it. I'd watched those who'd thrown their souls in front of strangers and their bemusement when it was handed back to them, marked and scratched. Sometimes they didn't even get it back. Well, they'd been careless. Some of them wept, of course. But it was too late. It's murderously difficult to get your soul back, in any condition, once you've let it slip away from you. There's no search party willing to go out in all weathers to find your lost soul.

To appear unambitious amongst the ambitious is to invite loathing or fear. To be in the game, but not playing with intent to win, is to be the enemy.

Our sanity depends essentially on a narrowness of vision
the ability to select the elements vital to survival, while ignoring the great truths.

Was my sin basically one of untruthfulness? Or, more likely, one of cowardice? But the liar knows the truth. The coward knows his fear and runs away.

The day then trapped me in its iron bars of phone calls and meetings, letters to read, letters to write, decisions to make, promises to break.

We learn from tragedy. Slowly.

Life is usually loved more than our most sacred love. In that knowledge lies the beginning of our cruelty and of our survival.

We do have choice, but not without some agony.

I want to know what's wrong with loving someone for life? Even when they're dead? What exactly is wrong with that? Why should I put him away, out of my mind? Like he's out of fashion. Does no one love for ever any more? Is no one built for the long road?

Memory is never pure. And recollection is always coloured by the life lived since

Sissy,travelling down the road with you was all I have ever wanted in life.
The beauty of it! No matter how long this takes, I'll wait.

There was a full moon in the starless sky. I thought how rarely I had noticed such things. Some deep failure of the soul perhaps. An inherited emptiness. A nothingness passed from generation to generation. A flaw in the psyche, discovered only by those who suffer by it.

And if I was bewildered through those decades, totally bewildered, so was the country I came from. The majority, what was the phrase? 'Condemn utterly what is happening, this barbarity.' But that's all we did. Condemn. And march. But not often enough.

Damaged people are dangerous. They know they can survive.

When boys called Bob and Bono would bring their own wild-rhythm celebration and the world would fall down in worshipful hallelujahs as it again acknowledged Ireland's capacity to create missionaries. So what if they were "the boys in the band"? They sang from a pulpit, an enormous pulpit looking down on a congregation that would knock your eyes out. A city that had produced Joyce and Beckett and Yeats, a country that had produced poet-heroes and more priests and nuns per head of population than almost any on earth was not going to spawn boys who just wanted to stand before a packed hall of gyrating teenagers and strum their guitars and sing. They had to have a message. One of salvation; they were in it to save the world. Like I said, we're teachers, missionaries.

Where would we be without it, memory? Well, it'll never die here. Never in this country. We feed it too well.

A concealed truth, that's all a lie is. Either by omission or commission we never do more than obscure. The truth stays in the undergrowth, waiting to be discovered.

When we mourn those who die young – those who have been robbed of time – we weep for lost joys. We weep for opportunities and pleasure we ourselves have never known. We feel sure that somehow that young body would have known the yearning delight for which we searched in vain all our lives. We believe that the untried soul, trapped in its young prison, might have flown free and known the joy that we still seek.

Very odd, old age. Always knew it would happen, if I was lucky. I just didn't expect it so soon.

Television ... the new gladiatorial arena.

We say that life is sweet, its satisfactions deep. All this we say, as we sleepwalk our time through years of days and nights. We let time cascade over us like a waterfall, believing it to be never-ending. Yet each day that touches us, and every man in the world, is unique; irredeemable; over. And just another Monday.