Early Life and Background
Pollock was born to Barbara and Johnny in Holywood, County Down. He had been having problems with both retinas since he was a child. When he was five years old, he lost all sight in his right eye, with the rest of his childhood being spent attempting to avoid rough team sports, in order to preserve the vision in his left eye. He studied Business and Economics in Trinity College, Dublin, where he became a champion schools rower and captain of the university's rowing club. The college later awarded him an honorary degree following confirmation of his blindness.
Read more about this topic: Mark Pollock
Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or background:
“We have good reason to believe that memories of early childhood do not persist in consciousness because of the absence or fragmentary character of language covering this period. Words serve as fixatives for mental images. . . . Even at the end of the second year of life when word tags exist for a number of objects in the child’s life, these words are discrete and do not yet bind together the parts of an experience or organize them in a way that can produce a coherent memory.”
—Selma H. Fraiberg (20th century)
“One reason writers write is out of revenge. Life hurts; certain ideas and experiences hurt; one wants to clarify, to set out illuminations, to replay the old bad scenes and get the Treppenworte said—the words one didn’t have the strength or ripeness to say when those words were necessary for one’s dignity or survival.”
—Cynthia Ozick (b. 1928)
“Silence is the universal refuge, the sequel to all dull discourses and all foolish acts, a balm to our every chagrin, as welcome after satiety as after disappointment; that background which the painter may not daub, be he master or bungler, and which, however awkward a figure we may have made in the foreground, remains ever our inviolable asylum, where no indignity can assail, no personality can disturb us.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)