Galway Quotes

The wages of dying are love. ~ Galway Kinnell

Running through things because you are familiar with them, breeds routine and this is the seed of boredom. ~ James Galway

I am delighted to be back home in Galway, the place I first came to as a 19-year-old in 1960. It's here where my heart is and will forever be. ~ Michael D. Higgins

I did care...
I did say everything I thought
In the mildest words I knew. And
now,...
I have to say I'm relieved it is over:
At the end I could feel only pity
For that urge toward more life.
...Goodbye ~ Galway Kinnell

Rapture

I can feel she has got out of bed.
That means it is seven a.m.
I have been lying with eyes shut,
thinking, or possibly dreaming,
of how she might look if, at breakfast,
I spoke about the hidden place in her
which, to me, is like a soprano's tremolo,
and right then, over toast and bramble jelly,
if such things are possible, she came.
I imagine she would show it while trying to conceal it.
I imagine her hair would fall about her face
and she would become apparently downcast,
as she does at a concert when she is moved.
The hypnopompic play passes, and I open my eyes
and there she is, next to the bed,
bending to a low drawer, picking over
various small smooth black, white,
and pink items of underwear. She bends
so low her back runs parallel to the earth,
but there is no sway in it, there is little burden, the day has hardly begun.
The two mounds of muscles for walking, leaping, lovemaking,
lift toward the east - what can I say?
Simile is useless; there is nothing like them on earth.
Her breasts fall full; the nipples
are deep pink in the glare shining up through the iron bars
of the gate under the earth where those who could not love
press, wanting to be born again.
I reach out and take her wrist
and she falls back into bed and at once starts unbuttoning my pajamas.
Later, when I open my eyes, there she is again,
~ Galway Kinnell

They're just treats. Like Cookie Monster says, 'Cookies are a sometimes food.' Sometimes doesn't mean never." "You're quoting Cookie Monster?" Bev stared at him. "Somebody has to. ~ Gretchen Galway

Second-hand gloves will become lovely again, their memories are what give them the need for other hands. And the desolation of lovers is the same: that enormous emptiness carved out of such tiny beings as we are asks to be filled; the need for the new love is faithfulness to the old. ~ Galway Kinnell

When the lover goes,
the vow though broken remains,
that trace of eternity love
brings down among us stays,
to give dignity to the suffering
and to intensify it. ~ Galway Kinnell

I love to go out in late September among the fat, overripe, icy, black blackberries to eat blackberries for breakfast, the stalks very prickly, a penalty they earn for knowing the black art of blackberry-making; and as I stand among them lifting the stalks to my mouth, the ripest berries fall almost unbidden to my tongue, as words sometimes do, certain peculiar words like strengths or squinched, many-lettered, one-syllabled lumps, which I squeeze, squinch open, and splurge well in the silent, startled, icy, black language of blackberry - eating in late September. ~ Galway Kinnell

They are all different and I find it hard to tell what flute suits me best. ~ James Galway

Choice, and all its attendant energy, is a characteristic of youth. It is before one chooses that one feels desire and longing without fulfillment, which gives an edge to any artistic endeavor. Galway Kinnell recently said in an interview that a young poet has so many choices but an old poet must simply endure his chosen life. ~ Mary Ruefle

Flying Home

As this plane dragged
its track of used ozone half the world long
thrusts some four hundred of us
toward places where actual known people
live and may wait,

we diminish down in our seats,
disappeared into novels of lives clearer than ours,
and yet we do not forget for a moment
the life down there, the doorway each will soon enter:

where I will meet her again
and know her again,
dark radiance with, and then mostly without, the stars.

Very likely she has always understood
what I have slowly learned,
and which only now, after being away, almost as far away

as one can get on this globe, almost
as far as thoughts can carry - yet still in her presence,
still surrounded not so much by reminders of her
as by things she had already reminded me of,
shadows of her
cast forward and waiting - can I try to express:

that love is hard,
that while many good things are easy, true love is not,
because love is first of all a power,
its own power,
which continually must make its way forward, from night
into day, from transcending union always forward into difficult day.

And as the plane descends, it comes to me
in the space
where tears stream down across the stars,
tears fallen on the actual earth
where their shining is what we call spirit,
that once t ~ Galway Kinnell

When I was a child and came with my elders to Galway for their salmon fishing in the river that rushes past the gaol, I used to look with awe at the window where men were hung, and the dark, closed gate. ~ Lady Gregory

What do they sing, the last birds
coasting down the twilight,
banking
across woods filled with darkness, their
frayed wings
curved on the world like a lover's arms
which form, night after night, in sleep,
an irremediable absence? ~ Galway Kinnell

I got to try the bagpipes. It was like trying to blow an octopus. ~ James Galway

Irish history having been forbidden in schools, has been, to a great extent, learned from Raftery's poems by the people of Mayo, where he was born, and of Galway, where he spent his later years. ~ Lady Gregory

Thousands of snapshots are taken of JFK that day. Many of them remain hanging in the pubs and homes of Galway. ~ Bill O'Reilly

If it's well written, even an obscene book cannot be immoral.
John McGahern, Galway, October 6th 2003. Acclaimed as the most important Irish novellist since James Joyce. ~ John McGahern

There are two versions to every poem – the crying version and the straight version ~ Galway Kinnell

REGINALD BURNABY THE GREAT (variously identified as a defrocked Roman Catholic priest from Galway, an ex-convict from Liverpool, if not an escaped convict from that seaport city) ~ Joyce Carol Oates

Kiss the mouth
which tells you,
here,
here is the world.
This mouth. This laughter.
These temple bones. ~ Galway Kinnell

I will find that special person who is wrong for me in just the right way. ~ Galway Kinnell

Each county has usually some family, or personage, supposed to have been favoured or plagued, especially by the phantoms, as the Hackets of Castle Hacket, Galway, who had for their ancestor a fairy, or John-o'-Daly of Lisadell, Sligo, who wrote Eilleen Aroon, ~ W.B.Yeats

You live
under the Sign
of the Bear, who flounders through chaos
in his starry blubber:
poor fool,
poor forked branch
of applewood, you will feel all your bones break
over the holy waters you will never drink. ~ Galway Kinnell

I use the traditional Moyse scale books slightly modified. ~ James Galway

Computers can deliver nuclear explosions to precisely anywhere on earth.
A lightning bolt is made entirely of error. ~ Galway Kinnell

Never just run through a study because you happen to be familiar with it, but use it to see what you can get from it on this new day which has been granted you. ~ James Galway

When I sleepwalk
into your room, and pick you up,
and hold you up in the moonlight, you cling to me
hard,
as if clinging could save us. I think
you think
I will never die, I think I exude
to you the permanence of smoke or stars,
even as
my broken arms heal themselves around you. ~ Galway Kinnell

Prose is walking; poetry is flying ~ Galway Kinnell

When the man touches through
to the exact center of the woman,
he lies motionless, in equilibrium,
in absolute desire, at the threshold
of the world to which the Creator Spirit
knows the pass-whisper, and whispers it,
and his loving friend becomes his divinity. ~ Galway Kinnell

I do not consider my self as having mastered the flute, but I get a real kick out of trying. ~ James Galway

She could feel the coolness, a whole childhood of it, falling through her. Rain on the coral beach in Galway. White tennis balls on the broken court. Her brother at his shortwave radio. A nest of wires and voices. Her father's cattle huddled on a laneway. The broken church bell. A grass verge of green in the laneway. High windows. Too tall for the school chairs. The milk came in small silver cans. She would not cry or whimper. She had always refused him that. ~ Colum McCann

That girl didn't have a moment's peace from the day Adriano Dardano set foot in Galway and started chasing her." Sister Brannigan said, as she led them around the convent garden. "Nice of Francesca to stay still for him to catch her then wasn't it?" Alessandro remarked dryly. "Mmph," the nun responded. "My grandfather loved Francesca," Alessandro insisted. "Far be it from me to speak ill of the dead. But let's call a spade a spade, hmm? Your grandfather was a charmer. Now perhaps he didn't realize just how naïve our Francesca was and how besotted with him she was." "Mmm, very generous of you," Alessandro grumbled. "I will say that on the times he brought some food he had made with Francesca up to the convent, it was clear he had a wonderful talent in the kitchen. Now mind ye, the Italian food was a bit rich for my taste but still, rather good." "I'm sure my grandfather's resting easier in his grave now that the holy sister has complimented his cooking," Alessandro whispered in Bree's ear making, her laugh out loud and Sister Brannigan turn to her in question. ~ E. Jamie

Yes indeed I have gained a lot out of playing scales and etudes. ~ James Galway

Go so deep into yourself, you speak for everyone. ~ Galway Kinnell

Everyone who plays the flute should learn singing. ~ James Galway

I have always intended to live forever; but not until now, to live now. ~ Galway Kinnell

It is normal to be nervous. ~ James Galway

Isn't it worth missing whatever joy / you might have dreamed, to wake in the night and find / you and your beloved are holding hands in your sleep? ~ Galway Kinnell

Bending over her bed, I saw the smile
I must have seen when gaping up from the crib.
Knowing death will come, sensing its onset,
may be a fair price for consciousness.
But looking at my sister, I wished
she could have died by surprise,
without ever knowing about death.
Too late. Wendy said, "I am in three parts.
Here on the left is red. That is pain.
On the right is yellow. That is exhaustion.
The rest is white. I don't know yet what white is. ~ Galway Kinnell

Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, it shows?"
Before Jude could answer, Brenna was up, pacing, knocking the heels of her hands against the sides of her, moaning out curses. "I'll have to move away, leave my family. I can go to the west counties. I have some people, on my mother's side, in Galway. No, no, that's not far enough. I'll have to leave the country entirely. I'll go to Chicago and stay with your granny until I get on me feet. She'll take me in, won't she? ~ Nora Roberts

I start off but I don't know where I'm going; I try this avenue and that avenue, that turns out to be a dead end, this is a dead end, and so on. The search takes a long time and I have to back-track often. ~ Galway Kinnell

How Could You Not - for Jane Kenyon

It is a day after many days of storms.
Having been washed and washed, the air glitters;
small heaped cumuli blow across the sky; a shower
visible against the firs douses the crocuses.

We knew it would happen one day this week.
Now, when I learn you have died, I go
to the open door and look across at New Hampshire
and see that there, too, the sun is bright
and clouds are making their shadowy ways along the horizon;

and I think: How could it not have been today?
In another room, Keri Te Kanawa is singing
the Laudate Dominum of Mozart, very faintly,
as if in the past, to those who once sat
in the steel seat of the old mowing machine,
cheerful descendent of the scythe of the grim reaper,

and drew the cutter bars little
reciprocating triangles through the grass
to make the stalks lie down in sunshine.
Could you have walked in the dark early this morning
and found yourself grown completely tired
of the successes and failures of medicine,
of your year of pain and despair remitted briefly
now and then by hope that had that leaden taste?

Did you glimpse in first light the world as you loved it
and see that, now, it was not wrong to die
and that, on dying, you would leave
your beloved in a day like paradise?

Near sunrise did you loosen your hold a little?
How could you not ~ Galway Kinnell

The west and southwest of Ireland bore the brunt of the famine. Those areas, including Mayo, Sligo, Roscommon, Galway, Clare, and Cork, were the poorest regions of the island, and the most dependent on subsistence farming. Not coincidentally, these were also the areas that Catholic Irish had been sent to during the Protestant plantation. ~ Ryan Hackney

I HATE you," she told her sister over the speakerphone in her secure wing of Brigid and Carwyn's house. "No, you don't." "I do." "What did Murphy do?" "Nothing." Except kiss me in Galway and remind me that I miss him like a lost limb. Stare at me during the opera as if he'd eat me alive in the most pleasurable way possible. Show off his intellect, which has always been the most attractive thing about him. "Patrick Murphy has been a complete gentleman," she said. "Unerringly polite and respectful. Painfully welcoming." Anne heard Mary suck on her cigarette and release a breath. "Hateful man. That would irritate the piss out of me. ~ Elizabeth Hunter

I have never received a flute from them for free and I would not accept such a gift from any manufacturer. ~ James Galway

Lately he's consumed by a sense that he is in fact two separate people, and soon he will have to choose which person to be on a full-time basis, and leave the other person behind. He has a life in Carricklea, he has friends. If he went to college in Galway he could stay with the same social group, really, and live the life he has always planned on, getting a good degree, having a nice girlfriend. People would say he had done well for himself. On the other hand, he could go to Trinity like Marianne. Life would be different then. He would start going to dinner parties and having conversations about the Greek bailout. He could fuck some weird-looking girls who turn out to be bisexual. I've read The Golden Notebook, he could tell them. It's true, he has read it. After that he would never come back to Carricklea, he would go somewhere else, London, or Barcelona. People would not necessarily think he had done well; some people might think he had gone very bad, while others would forget about him entirely. What would Lorraine think? She would want him to be happy, and not care what others said. But the old Connell, the one all his friends know, that person would be dead in a way, or worse, buried alive, and screaming under the earth. (26-27) ~ Sally Rooney

The Correspondence-School Instructor Says Goodbye to His Poetry Students

Goodbye, lady in Bangor, who sent me
snapshots of yourself, after definitely hinting
you were beautiful; goodbye,
Miami Beach urologist, who enclosed plain
brown envelopes for the return of your very
"Clinical Sonnets"; goodbye, manufacturer
of brassieres on the Coast, whose eclogues
give the fullest treatment in literature yet
to the sagging breast motif; goodbye, you in San Quentin,
who wrote, "Being German my hero is Hitler,"
instead of "Sincerely yours," at the end of long,
neat-scripted letters extolling the Pre-Raphaelites:

I swear to you, it was just my way
of cheering myself up, as I licked
the stamped, self-addressed envelopes,
the game I had of trying to guess
which one of you, this time,
had poisoned his glue. I did care.
I did read each poem entire.
I did say everything I thought
in the mildest words I knew. And now,
in this poem, or chopped prose, no better,
I realize, than those troubled lines
I kept sending back to you,
I have to say I am relieved it is over:
at the end I could feel only pity
for that urge toward more life
your poems kept smothering in words, the smell
of which, days later, tingled in your nostrils
as new, God-given impulses
to write.

Goodbye,
you who are, for me, the postmar ~ Galway Kinnell

Now is when the point of the story changes. ~ Galway Kinnell

There is a feel about Galway you can wear around your shoulders like a cloak. It hangs in the air with its dampness; it walks the cobblestone streets and stands in the doorways of its gray stone buildings. It blows in with the mist from the Atlantic and lingers incessantly at every corner. I have never been able to walk the streets of Galway without feeling some unnamed presence accompanying me. ~ Claire Fullerton

Wait, for now.
Distrust everything if you have to.
But trust the hours. Haven't they
carried you everywhere, up to now?
Personal events will become interesting again.
Hair will become interesting.
Pain will become interesting.
Buds that open out of season will become interesting.
Second-hand gloves will become lovely again;
their memories are what give them
the need for other hands. The desolation
of lovers is the same: that enormous emptiness
carved out of such tiny beings as we are
asks to be filled; the need
for the new love is faithfulness to the old.

Wait.
Don't go too early.
You're tired. But everyone's tired.
But no one is tired enough.
Only wait a little and listen:
music of hair,
music of pain,
music of looms weaving our loves again.
Be there to hear it, it will be the only time,
most of all to hear your whole existence,
rehearsed by the sorrows, play itself into total exhaustion. ~ Galway Kinnell

I was born in Ballaghadreen, but I grew up in Galway, and when I went to the University College of Galway, I became involved in the drama society there and started directing plays. ~ Garry Hynes

I do not see scales as abstract. ~ James Galway

For here, the moment all the spaces along the road between here and there - which the young know are infinite and all others know are not - get used up, that's it. ~ Galway Kinnell

By the time I got to the Paris Conservatoire I was very good at the scales and arpeggios. ~ James Galway

Such was the cyclical nature of Galway life: finding tragedy in the simple things and simplicity in the tragic things. ~ Rhian J. Martin

I always had this notion of a noir novel in Galway. The city is exploding, emigration has reversed, and we are fast becoming a cosmopolitan city. ~ Ken Bruen

Is there a mechanism of death, that so mutilates existence no one, gets over it not even the dead? ~ Galway Kinnell

Let our scars fall in love. ~ Galway Kinnell

You cannot prepare enough for anything. ~ James Galway

I think it is most important for a teacher to play the pieces and studies that are being played by the student. ~ James Galway

To me, poetry is somebody standing up, so to speak, and saying, with as little concealment as possible, what it is for him or her to be on earth at this moment ~ Galway Kinnell

and one knows,
after a long time of solitude, after the many steps taken
away from one's kind, toward the kingdom of strangers,
the hard prayer inside one's own singing
is to come back, if one can, to one's own,
a world almost lost, in the exile that deepens,
when one has lived a long time alone. ~ Galway Kinnell

When a group of people get up from a table, the table doesn't
know which way any of them will go. ~ Galway Kinnell

Little sleep's-head sprouting hair in the moonlight,
when I come back
we will go out together,
we will walk out together among,
the ten thousand things,
each scratched too late with such knowledge, the wages of dying is love. ~ Galway Kinnell

The Lord turned away washing
His hands without soap and water
Like a common housefly. ~ Galway Kinnell

Flower Herding On Mount Monadnock

In the forest I discover a flower.

The invisible life of the thing
Goes up in flames that are invisible,
Like cellophane burning in the sunlight.

It burns up. Its drift is to be nothing.

In its covertness it has a way
Of uttering itself in place of itself,
Its blossoms claim to float in the Empyrean,

A wrathful presence on the blur of the ground.

The appeal to heaven breaks off.
The petals begin to fall, in self-forgiveness.
It is a flower. On this mountainside it is dying. ~ Galway Kinnell

This happened to your father and to you, Galway-sick to stay, longing
to come up against the ends of the earth, and climb over. ~ Galway Kinnell

The quickest way to unlock your talent is to take the flute out of the box. ~ James Galway

Perhaps poetry will be the canary in the mine-shaft warning us of what's to come. ~ Galway Kinnell

Turn on the dream you lived
through the unwavering gaze.
It is as you thought: the living burn.
In the floating days
may you discover grace. ~ Galway Kinnell