Seamus Heaney Quotes
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The gift of writing is to be self-forgetful...
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I've always associated the moment of writing with a moment of lift, of joy, of unexpected reward.
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Anything Can Happen, on the other hand, is not only about the atrociousness of the September 11 attack, it is also a premonition of the deadly retaliation that was bound to come.
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The end of art is peace.
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Even if the last move did not succeed, the inner command says move again.
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Anyone with gumption and a sharp mind will take the measure of two things: what's said and what's done.
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On the contrary, a trust in the staying power and travel-worthiness of such good should encourage us to credit the possibility of a world where respect for the validity of every tradition will issue in the creation and maintenance of a salubrious political space.
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It is difficult at times to repress the thought that history is about as instructive as an abattoir; that Tacitus was right and that peace is merely the desolation left behind after the decisive operations of merciless power.
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The thing about writing is that if you have the impulse, you will find the time.
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Debate doesn’t really change things. It gets you bogged in deeper. If you can address or reopen the subject with something new, something from a different angle, then there is some hope. ... People are suddenly gazing at something else and pausing for a moment. And for the duration of that gaze and pause, they are like reflectors of the totality of their own knowledge and/or ignorance. That’s something poetry can do for you, it can entrance you for a moment above the pool of your own consciousness and your own possibilities.
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Once I was on the job, once I had got started, I felt safe enough, but the anticipation made me tense.
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I suppose I'm saying that defiance is actually part of the lyric job
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Whether it be a matter of personal relations within a marriage or political initiatives within a peace process, there is no sure-fire do-it-yourself kit.
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Sink every impulse like a bolt. Secure The bastion of sensation. Do not waver Into language. Do not waver in it.
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Best to say that once a poem is finished I trust it to make its way, and I trust readers will find their way to it and through it, if the thing has got itself rightly expressed.
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Hope for a great sea-change timid to rebuke and too petty to forgive.
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The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.
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It is always better to avenge dear ones than to indulge in mourning. For every one of us, living in this world means waiting for our end. Let whoever can win glory before death. When a warrior is gone, that will be his best and only bulwark.
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All I know is a door into the dark
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The completely solitary self: that's where poetry comes from, and it gets isolated by crisis, and those crises are often very intimate also.
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I credit poetry for making this space-walk possible.
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Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.
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If self is a location, so is love: Bearings taken, markings, cardinal points, Options, obstinacies, dug heels, and distance, Here and there and now and then, a stance.
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Strange, it is a huge nothing that we fear.