I don't miss teaching. I'm learning to take my time for myself.

If poetry and the arts do anything, they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness.

The dotted line my father's ashplant made On Sandymount Strand Is something else the tide won't wash away.

The main thing is to write for the joy of it. Cultivate a work-lust that imagines its haven like your hands at night dreaming the sun in the sunspot of a breast. You are fasted now, light-headed, dangerous. Take off from here.

It is difficult at times to repress the thought that history is about as instructive as an abattoir; that Tacitus was right and that peace is merely the desolation left behind after the decisive operations of merciless power.

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.

Strange, it is a huge nothing that we fear.