"The Irish seem to want their artists to function as surrogate priests - sources of authority, founts of wisdom, people who will offer us free-range organic consolation, you name it. It's not a position I feel comfortable with."

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No intellect is needed to see those figures who wait beyond the void of death - every child is aware of them, blazing with glories dark or bright, wrapped in authority older than the universe. They are the stuff of our earliest dreams, as of our dying visions. Rightly we feel our lives guided by them, and rightly too we feel how little we matter to them, the builders of the unimaginable, the fighters of wars beyond the totality of existence.

— Gene Wolfe