Quotations from favorite authors and songwriters.

1. Some of My
Cultural Heroes
and the things they’ve
said

2. William Butler Yeats

3. “Gratitude to Unknown Teachers”
“What they undertook to do
They brought to pass;
All things hang like a drop of dew
Upon a blade of grass.”

4. Van Morrison

5. “And our souls were clean
And the grass did grow”
“Streets of Arklow”

6. Greg Brown

7. “It’s just as well
we don’t know when things
Will never be that good again.”

8. Willa Cather

9. “Most of the basic material
a writer works with is acquired
before the age of fifteen.”

10. Leo Tolstoy

11. “He was nine years old
and 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.”

12. James Baldwin

13. “A child cannot be taught
by anyone who despises him,
and a child cannot afford to be fooled.”

14. Charles Dickens

15. "The school is not quite deserted,”
said the Ghost.
"A solitary child,
neglected by his friends,
is left there still."

16. Robert Bly

17. “Sometimes I go about pitying myself,
And all the time
I am being carried on great winds
across the sky.”

18. Van Morrison (again)

19. ”And all the little girls rhyme something
On the way back home from school
And the leaves fall one by one
And call the autumn time a fool”
“Cyprus Avenue”

20. Tove Ditlevsen

21. “Whatever one misses out on
in childhood,
one never gets enough of later.”

22. Vladimir Nabokov

23. “Curiosity is insubordination
in its purest form.”

24. Ralph Ellison

25. “The act of writing requires
a constant plunging back
into the shadow of the past
where time hovers ghostlike.”

26. Henrik Ibsen

27. “To live is to battle the demons
in the heart as well as the brain.
To write is to preside at
judgment day over one's self.”

28. William Butler Yeats (again)

29. Let’s hear it again for our unknown
teachers:
“What they undertook to do
They brought to pass;
All things hang like a drop of dew
Upon a blade of grass.”

30. Van Morrison (yet again)

31. “And our souls were clean
And the grass did grow”
“Streets of Arklow”