Irish Poet Quotes

Books of the sages of the ages reflect upon in stages; like honey their words on the tongue give due savour."
{Source: A Green Desert Father} ~ Richard Mc Sweeney

Irish improves a poet. ~ Sina Queyras

A troubled youth
burnt me alive
the poet came from the ashes
the words came from the fire ~ Atticus Poetry

Feminine psychology is admittedly odd, sir. The poet Pope ... "
"Never mind about the poet Pope, Jeeves."
"No, sir."
"There are times when one wants to hear all about the poet Pope and times when one doesn't."
"Very true, sir. ~ P.G. Wodehouse

I don't know who my parents were. I know nothing about my inheritance. I could be Jewish; I could be part Negro; I could be Irish; I could be Russian. I am spiritually a mix anyway, but I did have a solid childhood fortunately, because of some wonderful women who brought me up. I never had a father or a man in the house, and that was a loss, but you live with that loss. ~ James A. Michener

A great Tamil poet, given to decadence and debauchery, once said that the story of his life could serve as an example to the youth on how one should
not live. Having lived, or rather, having sleepwalked for ten years through the desolate wastelands of depression, I survived to reach the other side. I believe that this validates my claim to write this book for you. ~ Indu Muralidharan

I'm a poet. And then I put the poetry in the drama. I put it in short stories, and I put it in the plays. Poetry's poetry. It doesn't have to be called a poem, you know. ~ Tennessee Williams

When I see that the nineteenth century has crowned the idolatry of Art with the deification of Love, so that every poet is supposed to have pierced to the holy of holies when he has announced that Love is the Supreme, or the Enough, or the All, I feel that Art was safer in the hands of the most fanatical of Cromwell's major generals than it will be if ever it gets into mine. ~ George Bernard Shaw

What makes a man's 80 year-old Irish uncle skip like a little boy? Me Father is very fond of me! ~ John Ortberg Jr.

[H]e was one of those people who got to the top of an organisation through luck, connections, the indulgence of superiors and that sort of carelessness towards others that the easily impressed termed ruthlessness and those of a less gullible nature called sociopathy. But sometimes, just through his sheer unthinking brusqueness and inability to think through the consequences of a remark, he said what everybody else was only thinking. A comic poet working in obscene doggerel. ~ Iain M. Banks

The great thing about living until you get a bit older if you are a writer, and especially a poet, is that you have more life to reflect on. And I think that if I am better now - and I think that I am probably better than I was - is because that I simply have more to think about, more to get under control, more to understand. ~ Clive James

After I published a paper showing that suicidal poets used pronouns differently from non-suicidal poets, a slightly inebriated poet threatened me with a butter knife at a party in my own home. ~ James W. Pennebaker

A true poet does not bother to be poetical. Nor does a nursery gardener scent his roses.
~ Jean Cocteau

Critics are like eunuchs in a harem; they know how it's done, they've seen it done every day, but they're unable to do it themselves. ~ Brendan Behan

Have you ever wondered
What happens to all the
poems people write?
The poems they never
let anyone else read?
Perhaps they are
Too private and personal

Perhaps they are just not good enough.

Perhaps the prospect
of such a heartfelt
expression being seen as
clumsy
shallow silly
pretentious saccharine
unoriginal sentimental
trite boring
overwrought obscure stupid
pointless
or
simply embarrassing

is enough to give any aspiring
poet good reason to
hide their work from
public view.

forever.

Naturally many poems are IMMEDIATELY DESTROYED.
Burnt shredded flushed away
Occasionally they are folded
Into little squares
And wedged under the corner of
An unstable piece of furniture
(So actually quite useful)

Others are
hidden behind
a loose brick
or drainpipe
or
sealed into
the back of an
old alarm clock
or
put between the pages of
AN OBSCURE BOOK
that is unlikely
to ever be opened.

someone might find them one day,
BUT PROBABLY NOT
The truth is that unread poetry
Will almost always be just that.
DOOMED
to join a vast invisible river
of waste that flows out of suburbia.

well
Almost always.

On rare occasions,
Some especially insistent
piec ~ Shaun Tan

If I am not mistaken, it was a British poet who said that 'no one is properly dressed unless he wears a smile.' ~ Sukarno

If anyone comes to the gates of poetry and expects to become an adequate poet by acquiring expert knowledge of the subject without the Muses' madness, he will fail, and his self-controlled verses will be eclipsed by the poetry of men who have been driven out of their minds. ~ Plato

The Romans were a strong power before Virgil, but the Greeks had captured their imaginations. While Rome conquered physical Greece, Greek mythology had enveloped Rome. The Empire coul be confident in itself until a Roman poet matched Homer and harmonized Greek civilization with Roman ideals ~ John Mark Reynolds

They say that I am a poet I wonder what they would say if they saw me from the inside I bottle emotions and place them into the sea for others to unbottle on distant shores I am unsure as to whether they ever reach and for that matter as to whether I ever get my point across or my love ~ Saul Williams

The fairy poet takes a sheet Of moonbeam, silver white; His ink is dew from daisies sweet, His pen a point of light. ~ Joyce Kilmer

This is the main advantage of ether: it makes you behave like the village drunkard in some early Irish novel ... total loss of all basic motor skills: Blurred vision, no balance, numb tongue - severance of all connection between the body and the brain. Which is interesting, because the brain continues to function more or less normally ... you can actually watch yourself behaving in the terrible way, but you can't control it. ~ Hunter S. Thompson

Poetry is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal which the reader recognizes as his own. ~ Salvatore Quasimodo

She took time to think on things; but time had already moved on without her. ~ Sdparsons//IG Poet

It is clear that we do not exactly choose our poems; our poems choose us. ~ May Sarton

Oh, the Irish were building the railroads down through Mexico, through Chihuahua. They finished the railroads when they finished out in the West Coast, and they went down and put the trains into Mexico. ~ Anthony Quinn

But the divinest poem, or the life of a great man, is the severest satire ... The greater the genius, the keener the edge of the satire. ~ Henry David Thoreau

As for the charm and innocence I hoped to find -- it exists, it really does, but consider what it's buried in. Racism. Misogyny and homophobia so absolute as to be nearly universal. Hatred of the Irish, the Italians, the Chinese -- not that many of them are seen in these parts ~ Robert Charles Wilson

I have often noticed that nationalism is at its strongest at the periphery. Hitler was Austrian, Bonaparte Corsican. In postwar Greece and Turkey the two most prominent ultra-right nationalists had both been born in Cyprus. The most extreme Irish Republicans are in Belfast and Derry (and Boston and New York). Sun Yat Sen, father of Chinese nationalism, was from Hong Kong. The Serbian extremists Miloševic and Karadžic were from Montenegro and their most incendiary Croat counterparts in the Ustashe tended to hail from the frontier lands of Western Herzegovina. ~ Christopher Hitchens

Your favourite virtue ... Simplicity
Your favourite virtue in man ... Strength
Your favourite virtue in woman ... Weakness
Your chief characteristic ... Singleness of purpose
Your idea of happiness ... To fight
Your idea of misery ... Submission
The vice you excuse most ... Gullibility
The vice you detest most ... Servility
Your aversion ... Martin Tupper
Favourite occupation ... Book-worming
Favourite poet ... Shakespeare, Aeschylus, Goethe
Favourite prose-writer ... Diderot
Favourite hero ... Spartacus, Kepler
Favourite heroine ... Gretchen [Heroine of Goethe's Faust]
Favourite flower ... Daphne
Favourite colour ... Red
Favourite name ... Laura, Jenny
Favourite dish ... Fish
Favourite maxim ... Nihil humani a me alienum puto [Nothing human is alien to me]
Favourite motto ... De omnibus dubitandum [Everything must be doubted]. ~ Karl Marx

In 'The Hobbit,' there were British, Irish, Australian and New Zealand actors, and Peter Jackson was adamant that we would all sound like we were from Britain somewhere. ~ Aidan Turner

I get a huge energy transfusion from listening to poets read their works. ~ Grace Cavalieri

The poet will write for his peers alone. He will remember only that he saw truth and beauty from his position, and expect the time when a vision as broad shall overlook the same field as freely. ~ Henry David Thoreau

There is no way in which we can retrospectively erase the Treaty of Vienna or the Great Irish Famine. It is a peculiar feature of human actions that, once performed, they can never be recuperated. What is true of the past will always be true of it. ~ Terry Eagleton

I always thought I was going to be a great poet, and go and live in New York, where the great poets lived - you know, where Whitman had walked the streets. ~ Garth Risk Hallberg

The artist (I suppose) usually pays for the privilege by some sort of partial insomnia, by the possession of one faculty that will not be controlled nor put to sleep. In a poet this must often be the visual imagination, bringing before his eyes a succession of images which he never summoned, and of which some (it is only too likely) will be ugly or pitiful. ~ Mary Lascelles

Have patience. All things are difficult before they become easy. ~ Saadi

I'm from durable stock. I'm made to work. I'm Irish. ~ Mary McCormack

My soul is still Irish. ~ Ciaran Hinds

We spend so much time listening to the things people are saying that we rarely pay attention to the things they don't," says slam poet and teacher Clint Smith. A short, powerful piece from the heart, about finding the courage to speak up against ignorance and injustice. ~ Clint Smith

In other words, if your boy is a poet, horse manure can only mean flowers to him; which is, of course, what horse manure has always been about. ~ Ray Bradbury

I am, of course, directly descended from Brian Boru, the last king of Ireland, a fact certified by my mother and therefore beyond dispute. But as everybody else with a drop of Irish blood in his carcass is also a guaranteed descendant of the old billy goat, I am not overly arrogant because of this royal strain. ~ Preston Sturges

I always knew Fitz would wind up writing; although I figured he'd be a poet or a storyteller. He would play with language the way other children played with stones and twigs, building structures for the rest of us to decorate with our imagination. ~ Jodi Picoult

Whether they write poems or don't write poems, poets are best. ~ Randall Jarrell

Freedom is within.
Only God can give it to you. ~ Ocean Crisstopher Poet

He was a secretive man, who kept his own counsel. He was an ambitious man of humble origins, with colossal designs on the future. And it would always be advantageous not to be closely known, never to be transparent. Passing a farmer on a day, he would tip his hat and grin. Everybody knew him. Nobody knew him. He would play the fool, the clown, the melancholy poet dying for love, the bumpkin. He would take the world by stealth and not by storm. He would disarm enemies by his apparent naiveté, by seeming pleasantly harmless. He would go to such lengths in making fun of his own appearance that others felt obliged to defend it. -Daniel Mark Epstein. ~ Daniel Mark Epstein

A poem has secrets that the poet knows nothing of. ~ Stanley Kunitz