President-elect Joe Biden, speaking a little while ago in Wilmington, Delaware:
”My colleagues in the Senate used to always kid me for quoting Irish poets. They thought I did it because I’m Irish. I didn’t do it for that reason; I did it because they’re the best poets in the world.[My transcription, from watching again at C-SPAN. One source for the Joyce quotation: Ulick O’Connor, Oliver St John Gogarty (1964).]
“James Joyce was said to have told a friend that when it comes his time to pass, when he dies, he said, ‘Dublin [long pause], Dublin will be written on my heart.’ Well, excuse the emotion, but when I die, Delaware will be written on my heart, and the hearts of all of us, all the Bidens.”
Borrowed from Mary Tudor, re "Calais."
ReplyDeleteThanks for that!
ReplyDeleteGollee, to have a president who quotes Joyce!
ReplyDeleteAfter one who quotes... who does he quote? Himself? "No, but you're not quoting me accurately."
What a world!
You know he also recites lines from Seamus Heaney’s The Cure at Troy, yes? Maybe other things too.
ReplyDeleteAnd to have a reader who knows that Joyce borrowed from Mary Tudor!
I had to look up “No, but you’re not quoting me accurately.” That was only four months ago?