my cultural heroes

Some of My

Cultural Heroesand the

things they’ve said

William Butler Yeats

“Gratitude to Unknown Teachers”

“What they undertook to doThey brought to pass;

All things hang like a drop of dewUpon a blade of grass.”

Van Morrison

“And our souls were cleanAnd the grass did grow”

“Streets of Arklow”

Greg Brown

“It’s just as wellwe don’t know

when thingsWill never be that good again.”

Willa Cather

“Most of the basic material

a writer works with is acquiredbefore the age of fifteen.”

Leo Tolstoy

“He was nine years oldand quite a child,

but he knew his soul,it was dear to him, and he guarded it

as the eyelid guards the eye, and never let anyone enter his heart

without the key of love.”

James Baldwin

“A child cannot be taughtby anyone who despises him,

and a child cannot afford to be fooled.”

Charles Dickens

"The school is not quite deserted,”said the Ghost."A solitary child,

neglected by his friends,is left there still."

Robert Bly

“Sometimes I go about pitying myself,And all the time

I am being carried on great windsacross the sky.”

Van Morrison (again)

”And all the little girls rhyme something

On the way back home from school

And the leaves fall one by oneAnd call the autumn time a fool”

“Cyprus Avenue”

Tove Ditlevsen

“Whatever one misses out onin childhood,

one never gets enough of later.”

Vladimir Nabokov

“Curiosity is insubordinationin its purest form.”

Ralph Ellison

“The act of writing requiresa constant plunging back

into the shadow of the pastwhere time hovers ghostlike.”

Henrik Ibsen

“To live is to battle the demons

in the heart as well as the brain.

To write is to preside atjudgment day over

one's self.”

William Butler Yeats (again)

Let’s hear it again for our unknown teachers:

“What they undertook to doThey brought to pass;

All things hang like a drop of dewUpon a blade of grass.”

Van Morrison (yet again)

“And our souls were cleanAnd the grass did grow”

“Streets of Arklow”