Born on September 24th

"The concept of two people living together for 25 years without a serious dispute suggests a lack of spirit only to be admired in sheep."

"If nobody said anything unless he knew what he was talking about, a ghastly hush would descend upon the earth."

"Let's find out what everyone is doing, And then stop everyone from doing it."

"People must not do things for fun. We are not here for fun. There is no reference to fun in any Act of Parliament."

"This high official, all allow, is grossly overpaid; there wasn't any Board, and now there isn't any Trade."

"A high-brow is someone who looks at a sausage and thinks of Picasso."

"The critical period of matrimony is breakfast-time."

"I am sure that the party system is right and necessary. There must be some scum."

"An Englishman never enjoys himself, except for a noble purpose."

"The Englishman never enjoys himself except for a noble purpose."

"The concept of two people living together for 25 years without a serious dispute suggests a lack of spirit only to be admired in sheep."

"For a writer, published works are like fallen flowers, but the expected new work is like a calyx waiting to blossom."

"As society diversifies, the number of people who read literature is decreasing. It will be difficult for readers to digest my ideas through literature."

"For a writer, life is always too short to write. I will just try my best during what remains of my life."

"In the field of love & connection, love is the alignment of two souls speaking a language that words can never fully translate."

"To love is to see the quiet beauty hidden within another's struggles and stand by them. As a statesperson & leader, this is the foundational truth I have observed."

"The greatest force of creation is the warmth we share in the quiet spaces of our connection."

"The closer a Negro got to the ballot box, the more he looked like a rapist."

"Education in the past has been too much inspiration and too little information."

"America faces a new race that has awakened."

"Educational institutes can no longer be prizes in church politics or furnish berths for failure in other walks of life."

"Poetry begins where language starts: in the shadows and accidents of one person's life."

"If a poet does not tell the truth about time, his or her work will not survive it. Past or present, there is a human dimension to time, human voices within it, and human griefs ordained by it."

"I was Irish; I was a woman. Yet night after night, bent over the table, I wrote in forms explored and sealed by English men hundreds of years before. I saw no contradiction."

"There is nothing settled about a poet's identity. The becoming doesn't stop because the being has been achieved. They proceed together, attached in ways that are hard to be exact about."

"Our present will become the past of other men and women. We depend on them to remember it with the complexity with which it was suffered. As others, once, depended on us."

"I had grown up as an Irish poet in a country where the distance between vision and imagination was not quite as wide as in some other countries."

"I didn't know how to weigh ideas about poetry. Nothing in the life I lived as a student - and later as wife and mother at the suburban edge of Dublin - suggested I had the wherewithal to do so. But I did have a unit of measurement. It was the measure of my own life."

"During my twenties and thirties, my interest in the political poem increased as my apparent access to it declined. I sensed resistances around me. I was married; I lived in a suburb; I had small children."

"I was a foggy, erratic teenager: a fifth child, the last in the queue for conversation or attention."