Conor O'Driscoll

Physically his body, simplified by burning to the element of carbon, re-enters the physical process of the world.

Poems, even when narrative, do not resemble stories. All stories are about battles, of one kind or another, which end in victory and defeat. Everything moves towards the end, when the outcome will be known. Poems, regardless of any outcome, cross the battlefields, tending the wounded, listening to the wild monologues of the triumphant or the fearful. They bring a kind of peace.

Yet poetry uses the same words, and more or less the same syntax as, say, the Annual General Report of a multinational corporation. (Corporations that prepare for their profit some of the most terrible battlefields of the modern world.) How then can poetry so transform language that, instead of simply communicating information, it listens and promises and fulfills the role of a god?

One’s death is already one’s own. It belongs to nobody else: not even to a killer. This means that it is already part of one’s life.

A name and two dates, the last one precise to the very day. This is what is recorded. About what happened between, apart from the bare fact of survival, not a word is written.

The masses, the required anonymous labor force, persist in remaining a population of individuals, despite their living and working conditions, despite their displacement.

I have always thought that household gods were animals. Sometimes visible and sometimes invisible, but always present.

Going to sleep, I cross my hands on my chest.
They will place my hands like this.
It will look as though I am flying into myself.

I relied on my gift for mimicking authority figures and playing back to them their own ideas as though they were conclusions I’d reached myself. … What was learning but a form of borrowing? And what was intelligence but borrowing slyly?

If we devote ourselves exclusively to modern literature—we get to think the world is progressing when it is only repeating itself.

Local libraries “are often peopled with … students who can’t find a quiet place at home to work.… Denying these children the space and silence to study and contemplate the past that the better-off may be able to find in a spare room of their house is nothing short of social discrimination at its worst.” Leslie fears a return to a time “when only the elite could afford silence.”

For an adult reader, the possible verdicts are five: I can see this is good and I like it; I can see this is good but I don’t like it; I can see this is good, and, though at present I don’t like it, I believe with perseverance I shall come to like it; I can see that this is trash but I like it; I can see that this is trash and I don’t like it.

No critic will ever amount to much who does not start with strong personal preferences and end by transcending them so that he can see the good in works which are not really his ‘dish.’

Once upon a time we chose none of our reading: it all came to us unbidden, unanticipated, unknown, and from the hand of someone who loved us.

For many children the act of being read to—and therefore the book itself—is powerfully associated with being loved.

Young people often signal through their pretensions what they hope to become: they have discerned, maybe in a limited way, some good and they are pursuing it as best they can, given limited knowledge and experience.

The conventions called those appearances reality. Perspective makes the single eye the centre of the visible world.

You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her, you put a mirror in her hand and you called the painting Vanity, thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you had depicted for your own pleasure.

Hack work is not the result of either clumsiness or provincialism; it is the result of the market making more insistent demands than the art.

The exotic and nostalgic attraction of the Mediterranean.

The purpose of publicity is to make the spectator marginally dissatisfied with his present way of life. Not with the way of life of society, but with his own within it.

Publicity turns consumption into a substitute for democracy. The choice of what one eats (or wears or drives) takes the place of significant political choice. Publicity helps to mask and compensate for all that is undemocratic within society.

To be continued by the reader

The past is never there waiting to be discovered, to be recognized for exactly what it is. History always constitutes the relation between a present and its past.

Intelligence that’s not modulated and moderated by creativity, common sense and wisdom is not such a positive thing to have. What it leads to is people who are very good at advancing themselves, often at other people’s expense.