Ian McDonald

Tradition gathers around Christmas. Pageants and homecomings and longed-for preparations repeat themselves year after year and become treasured lifetime rituals.

Out of infinite pain the mind of man can fashion beauty.

Winston Churchill, exasperated by opposition politicians constantly questioning his policies and his own credentials and frustrated by having to consult and compromise on measures which in his judgement were straightforward and ripe for introduction without hesitation, once exploded: “Democracy is the worst kind of government!”

One of the strangest paradoxes in the history of the human race is that while men have commonly dominated simply by virtue of their greater strength and aggression, women time and time again have been the cause of their downfall and defeat.

Seamus Heaney, the great Irish poet, whose marvellous collection of essays The Redress of Poetry I like to re-read, writes that WH Auden’s elegy for Yeats was “a rallying cry that celebrates poetry for being on the side of life, and continuity of effort, and enlargement of the spirit.”

One man is running a company with the help of three old family retainers, two others who haven’t had a new idea in a couple of generations, and a whole raft of school drop-outs.

There are some things that keep out the darkness that continually threatens in anyone’s life.

When I was young, and benefited not only from a fresh and eagerly absorptive mind but also from a strong belief that an eternity of life stretched in front of me, I loved to read big books, books of immense length.

Two weeks later I am still sweating with the initial nervousness and horror and still dancing in the final exultation of our victory in the World Cup.

The list is long in Guyana of problems needing solution and the list isn’t shortening.

In two of the main centres of democracy, America and Europe, democracy is rapidly failing.

I remember ‘Read to Succeed‘ was once the theme of the activities and exhibitions organized to celebrate the work of library services for the children of Guyana.

How is a great poem created? It is a mystery. It is like asking for an explanation of a square cut by Gary Sobers or a cover drive by Rohan Kanhai.

At high tide, when the wind is strong, from my veranda in Bel Air Gardens I could swear the sea seems taller these days.

More than sixty years ago – can it be so many years, gone so quickly, insubstantial as a dream?

The great unabridged Oxford English Dictionary contains half a million words.

I have written often about the importance of using clear, accurate language in explaining the problems that face a nation like Guyana.

“We receive three educations, one from our parents, one from our schoolmasters, and one from the world.

If you do not read poetry you miss much. You miss star showers around your head and arrows near your heart.

Like a stampede of wild horses on a dirt highway, daily events in the constant chaos of their unfolding kick up a vast obscuring cloud of dust and smoke.