Seamus Heaney Quotes
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The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.
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Suspect too much sweet talk but never close your mind.
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The end of art is peace.
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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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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 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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Even if the last move did not succeed, the inner command says move again.
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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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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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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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The thing about writing is that if you have the impulse, you will find the time.
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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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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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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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All I know is a door into the dark
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The next move is always the test.
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I rhyme… to see myself, to set the darkness echoing.
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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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Hope for a great sea-change timid to rebuke and too petty to forgive.
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I suppose I'm saying that defiance is actually part of the lyric job
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Behaviour that's admired is the path to power among people everywhere.
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I credit poetry for making this space-walk possible.
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It has as much to do with the energy released by linguistic fission and fusion, with the buoyancy generated by cadence and tone and rhyme and stanza, as it has to do with the poem's concerns or the poet's truthfulness.