Seamus Heaney Quotes
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The thing about writing is that if you have the impulse, you will find the time.
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The end of art is peace.
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It is difficult at times to repress the thought that history is about as instructive as an abattoir.
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Part of my gradual education of myself has been to think that there is a deep relationship between the nature of the creature and the worth of the art.
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I credit poetry for making this space-walk possible.
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The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.
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I have always thought of poems as stepping stones in one's own sense of oneself.
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No bit of the natural world is more valuable or more vulnerable than the tree bit. Nothing is more like ourselves, standing upright, caught between heaven and earth, frail at the extremities, yet strong at the central trunk, and nothing is closer to us at the beginning and at the end, providing the timber boards that frame both the cradle and the coffin.
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At home in Ireland, there's a habit of avoidance, an ironical attitude towards the authority figure.
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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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Strange, it is a huge nothing that we fear.
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I always believed that whatever had to be written would somehow get itself written.
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The way we are living, timorous or bold, will have been our life.
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The appointment in Harvard gave me economic safety, writerly support, and intellectual self-respectplus eight months to myself every year.
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There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you.
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A writer is not different from a reader, in that the common ragbag of orthodoxies and assumptions is what a poet has to work with as well.
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History says, Don’t hope On this side of the grave, But then, once in a lifetime The longed-for tidal wave Of justice can rise up, And hope and history rhyme
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Publication is rather like pushing the boat out; then the boat/book turns into a melting ice floe and you have to conjure a second boat which again turns into a melting floe under your feet. All the stepping stones that you conjure disappear under the water behind you.
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But even so, none of the news of these world-spasms entered me as terror.
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You had to come back to learn how to lose yourself, to be pilot and stray-witch, Hansel and Gretel in one.
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Not to Learn Irish is to miss the opportunity of understanding what life in this country has meant and could mean in a better future. It is to cut oneself off from ways of being at home. If we regard self-understanding, mutual understanding, imaginative enhancement, cultural diversity and a tolerant political atmosphereas a desirable attainments, we should remember that a knowledge of the Irish language is an essential element in their realisation.
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Smile As you find a rhythm Working you, slow mile by mile, Into your proper haunt.
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Im a firm believer in learning by heart.
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The main thing is to write for the joy of it. Cultivate a work-lust that imagines its haven like your hands at night dreaming the sun in the sunspot of a breast. You are fasted now, light-headed, dangerous. Take off from here.