"Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained." ― Seamus Heaney Topic(s): Experience Tags: hopes More From Seamus Heaney "Poetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to it." "A public expectation, it has to be said, not of poetry as such but of political positions variously approvable by mutually disapproving groups." "But that citizen’s perception was also at one with the truth in recognizing that the very brutality of the means by which the IRA were pursuing change was destructive of the trust upon which new possibilities would have to be based." More In Experience "A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions."― Oliver Wendell Holmes "Is it not rather what we expect in men, that they should have numerous strands of experience lying side by side and never compare them with each other?"― George Eliot "My experience of life is that it’s very fragmented; certain kinds of things happen, and in another place, a different kind of thing occurs. I would like my work to have some vivid indication of those differences."― Jasper Johns