Quotes & Sayings About Galway

It is necessary
to reteach a thing its loveliness,
to put a hand on its brow
of the flower
and retell it in words and in touch
it is lovely
until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing ... — Galway Kinnell

I do not consider my self as having mastered the flute, but I get a real kick out of trying. — James Galway

I've always liked that Galway Kinnell poem. 'Wait, for now. Distrust everything, if you have to. But trust the hours. Haven't they carried you everywhere, up to now?'" She had a fine voice for reciting poetry, deep-timbered and slow. "Doesn't that just make everything better? — Brittany Cavallaro

Scales played in the correct musical way are very exciting and rewarding. — James Galway

They're just treats. Like Cookie Monster says, 'Cookies are a sometimes food.' Sometimes doesn't mean never." "You're quoting Cookie Monster?" Bev stared at him. "Somebody has to. — Gretchen Galway

I grew up in the west of Ireland, and Galway was our local seaside resort. We'd go for one day of the year during the summer, and I have enduring memories of the sand and the sea. — Philip Treacy

You can sightread better if you know your scales and arpeggios. — James Galway

I always had this notion of a noir novel in Galway. The city is exploding, emigration has reversed, and we are fast becoming a cosmopolitan city. — Ken Bruen

The wages of dying are love. — Galway Kinnell

Perhaps poetry will be the canary in the mine-shaft warning us of what's to come. — Galway Kinnell

Isn't it worth missing whatever joy / you might have dreamed, to wake in the night and find / you and your beloved are holding hands in your sleep? — Galway Kinnell

The west and southwest of Ireland bore the brunt of the famine. Those areas, including Mayo, Sligo, Roscommon, Galway, Clare, and Cork, were the poorest regions of the island, and the most dependent on subsistence farming. Not coincidentally, these were also the areas that Catholic Irish had been sent to during the Protestant plantation. — Ryan Hackney

Go so deep into yourself, you speak for everyone. — Galway Kinnell

Control of vibrato helps your musical expression. — James Galway

I love to go out in late September among the fat, overripe, icy, black blackberries to eat blackberries for breakfast, the stalks very prickly, a penalty they earn for knowing the black art of blackberry-making; and as I stand among them lifting the stalks to my mouth, the ripest berries fall almost unbidden to my tongue, as words sometimes do, certain peculiar words like strengths or squinched, many-lettered, one-syllabled lumps, which I squeeze, squinch open, and splurge well in the silent, startled, icy, black language of blackberry - eating in late September. — Galway Kinnell

The secret title of every good poem might be 'Tenderness — Galway Kinnell

When a group of people get up from a table, the table doesn't
know which way any of them will go. — Galway Kinnell

I HATE you," she told her sister over the speakerphone in her secure wing of Brigid and Carwyn's house. "No, you don't." "I do." "What did Murphy do?" "Nothing." Except kiss me in Galway and remind me that I miss him like a lost limb. Stare at me during the opera as if he'd eat me alive in the most pleasurable way possible. Show off his intellect, which has always been the most attractive thing about him. "Patrick Murphy has been a complete gentleman," she said. "Unerringly polite and respectful. Painfully welcoming." Anne heard Mary suck on her cigarette and release a breath. "Hateful man. That would irritate the piss out of me. — Elizabeth Hunter

I want to say a very sincere thank you for this welcome home - it is a wonderful welcome home. It is the place to where I return and where I will always return because it is of Galway that I am. — Michael D. Higgins

I am delighted to be back home in Galway, the place I first came to as a 19-year-old in 1960. It's here where my heart is and will forever be. — Michael D. Higgins

Such was the cyclical nature of Galway life: finding tragedy in the simple things and simplicity in the tragic things. — Rhian J. Martin

Choice, and all its attendant energy, is a characteristic of youth. It is before one chooses that one feels desire and longing without fulfillment, which gives an edge to any artistic endeavor. Galway Kinnell recently said in an interview that a young poet has so many choices but an old poet must simply endure his chosen life. — Mary Ruefle

For here, the moment all the spaces along the road between here and there - which the young know are infinite and all others know are not - get used up, that's it. — Galway Kinnell

By the time I got to the Paris Conservatoire I was very good at the scales and arpeggios. — James Galway

This happened to your father and to you, Galway-sick to stay, longing
to come up against the ends of the earth, and climb over. — Galway Kinnell

The bud
stands for all things,
even for those things that don't flower — Galway Kinnell

Let our scars fall in love. — Galway Kinnell

I was born in Ballaghadreen, but I grew up in Galway, and when I went to the University College of Galway, I became involved in the drama society there and started directing plays. — Garry Hynes

The only sense we still respect is eyesight, probably because it is so closely attached to the brain. Go into any American house at random, you will find something - a plastic flower, false tiles, some imitation something - something which can be appreciated as material only if apprehended by eyesight alone. Don't we go sightseeing in cars, thinking we can experience a landscape by looking at it through glass? — Galway Kinnell

To me, poetry is somebody standing up, so to speak, and saying, with as little concealment as possible, what it is for him or her to be on earth at this moment — Galway Kinnell

That's the way it is with poetry: When it is incomprehensible it seems profound, and when you understand it, it is only ridiculous. — Galway Kinnell

I use the traditional Moyse scale books slightly modified. — James Galway

And yet again, I was beginning the long process of coming undone in the hundred vestibules of my own soul. Breakdowns were common to me by then, and I attributed them to that sour Irish gene. But I could cast plenty of blame on my washed in the blood of the lamb Southern roots also. Taken together, it looked like a wicked combination of destinies, Irish and Southern, forming a comfortable birthplace for lunatics, nutcases, borderlines, and psychos. I could not blame everything on a bar fight in Galway when I also had these smoldering fires of white lightning smoking in a copper coil ... — Pat Conroy

Is there a mechanism of death, that so mutilates existence no one, gets over it not even the dead? — Galway Kinnell

It was more or less late afternoon
and I came over a hilltop
and smack in front of me was the sunset. — Galway Kinnell

I start off but I don't know where I'm going; I try this avenue and that avenue, that turns out to be a dead end, this is a dead end, and so on. The search takes a long time and I have to back-track often. — Galway Kinnell

I think it is most important for a teacher to play the pieces and studies that are being played by the student. — James Galway

Jack Taylor was a private investigator in Galway, which seemed like madness. I used lots of Galway-isms, which seemed like madness, too. — Ken Bruen

I have to report to those of you who think diamonds make a difference that I cannot tell what it is. Seriously, as you all know, they make no difference at all. They just make the flute look a little more special. — James Galway

The mind of the performer is a very strange thing. — James Galway

I have always intended to live forever; but not until now, to live now. — Galway Kinnell

Irish history having been forbidden in schools, has been, to a great extent, learned from Raftery's poems by the people of Mayo, where he was born, and of Galway, where he spent his later years. — Lady Gregory

You live
under the Sign
of the Bear, who flounders through chaos
in his starry blubber:
poor fool,
poor forked branch
of applewood, you will feel all your bones break
over the holy waters you will never drink. — Galway Kinnell

Each county has usually some family, or personage, supposed to have been favoured or plagued, especially by the phantoms, as the Hackets of Castle Hacket, Galway, who had for their ancestor a fairy, or John-o'-Daly of Lisadell, Sligo, who wrote Eilleen Aroon, — W.B.Yeats

Second-hand gloves will become lovely again, their memories are what give them the need for other hands. And the desolation of lovers is the same: that enormous emptiness carved out of such tiny beings as we are asks to be filled; the need for the new love is faithfulness to the old. — Galway Kinnell

How many nights must it take
one such as me to learn
that we aren't, after all, made
from that bird that flies out of its ashes,
that for us
as we go up in flames, our one work
is
to open ourselves, to be
the flames? — Galway Kinnell

She could feel the coolness, a whole childhood of it, falling through her. Rain on the coral beach in Galway. White tennis balls on the broken court. Her brother at his shortwave radio. A nest of wires and voices. Her father's cattle huddled on a laneway. The broken church bell. A grass verge of green in the laneway. High windows. Too tall for the school chairs. The milk came in small silver cans. She would not cry or whimper. She had always refused him that. — Colum McCann

Never just run through a study because you happen to be familiar with it, but use it to see what you can get from it on this new day which has been granted you. — James Galway

I will find that special person who is wrong for me in just the right way. — Galway Kinnell

The quickest way to unlock your talent is to take the flute out of the box. — James Galway

The first step in the journey is to lose your way. — Galway Kinnell

Prose is walking; poetry is flying — Galway Kinnell

maybe there is no sublime; only the shining of the amnion's tatters. — Galway Kinnell

Running through things because you are familiar with them, breeds routine and this is the seed of boredom. — James Galway

I have never received a flute from them for free and I would not accept such a gift from any manufacturer. — James Galway

You cannot prepare enough for anything. — James Galway

Turn on the dream you lived
through the unwavering gaze.
It is as you thought: the living burn.
In the floating days
may you discover grace. — Galway Kinnell

Sometimes it is necessary To reteach a thing its loveliness — Galway Kinnell

There is a feel about Galway you can wear around your shoulders like a cloak. It hangs in the air with its dampness; it walks the cobblestone streets and stands in the doorways of its gray stone buildings. It blows in with the mist from the Atlantic and lingers incessantly at every corner. I have never been able to walk the streets of Galway without feeling some unnamed presence accompanying me. — Claire Fullerton

Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, it shows?"
Before Jude could answer, Brenna was up, pacing, knocking the heels of her hands against the sides of her, moaning out curses. "I'll have to move away, leave my family. I can go to the west counties. I have some people, on my mother's side, in Galway. No, no, that's not far enough. I'll have to leave the country entirely. I'll go to Chicago and stay with your granny until I get on me feet. She'll take me in, won't she? — Nora Roberts

Taking drugs to overcome nerves is the thin edge of the wedge going in there. — James Galway

Kiss the mouth
which tells you,
here,
here is the world.
This mouth. This laughter.
These temple bones. — Galway Kinnell

If it's well written, even an obscene book cannot be immoral.
John McGahern, Galway, October 6th 2003. Acclaimed as the most important Irish novellist since James Joyce. — John McGahern

Thousands of snapshots are taken of JFK that day. Many of them remain hanging in the pubs and homes of Galway. — Bill O'Reilly

Little sleep's-head sprouting hair in the moonlight,
when I come back
we will go out together,
we will walk out together among,
the ten thousand things,
each scratched too late with such knowledge, the wages of dying is love. — Galway Kinnell

When I was a child and came with my elders to Galway for their salmon fishing in the river that rushes past the gaol, I used to look with awe at the window where men were hung, and the dark, closed gate. — Lady Gregory

When I sleepwalk
into your room, and pick you up,
and hold you up in the moonlight, you cling to me
hard,
as if clinging could save us. I think
you think
I will never die, I think I exude
to you the permanence of smoke or stars,
even as
my broken arms heal themselves around you. — Galway Kinnell

The first step ... shall be to lose the way. — Galway Kinnell

Yes indeed I have gained a lot out of playing scales and etudes. — James Galway

I got to try the bagpipes. It was like trying to blow an octopus. — James Galway

What do they sing, the last birds
coasting down the twilight,
banking
across woods filled with darkness, their
frayed wings
curved on the world like a lover's arms
which form, night after night, in sleep,
an irremediable absence? — Galway Kinnell

REGINALD BURNABY THE GREAT (variously identified as a defrocked Roman Catholic priest from Galway, an ex-convict from Liverpool, if not an escaped convict from that seaport city) — Joyce Carol Oates

Never mind. The self is the least of it. Let our scars fall in love — Galway Kinnell

I do not see scales as abstract. — James Galway

They are all different and I find it hard to tell what flute suits me best. — James Galway

Everyone who plays the flute should learn singing. — James Galway

This one whom habit of memory propels to the ground of his making,
sleeper only the mortal sounds can sing awake,
this blessing love gives again into our arms. — Galway Kinnell

It is normal to be nervous. — James Galway

Galway Kinnell came out with that wonderful big, breathy, hollow voice of his and read, for the first time in public, "The Bear." That poem impressed me so much that I memorized it. I used it for years when I taught in prisons. It's a powerful extended metaphor for what the writing life is really all about. It's a uniquely powerful poem about self-transformation, and that's what we're asking, really, beyond even our objection to the war. We're asking people to look at themselves and think about what might be possible with a little self-transformation. — Sam Hamill