Seamus Heaney Quotes
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I have always thought of poems as stepping stones in one's own sense of oneself.
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Behaviour that's admired is the path to power among people everywhere.
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I shall gain glory or die.
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Strange, it is a huge nothing that we fear.
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Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.
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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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Between my finger and my thumb The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.
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Wherever that man went, he went gratefully.
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The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.
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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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There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you.
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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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The way we are living, timorous or bold, will have been our life.
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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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But even so, none of the news of these world-spasms entered me as terror.
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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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Im a firm believer in learning by heart.
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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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The whole relationship between a writer's spiritual/emotional condition and the kind of wordstuff and form-making that's going on in his work is an interesting one. When I was an undergraduate, there was a glib notion around that there was no reason to suppose a bad man could be a good writer.
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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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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.
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I always believed that whatever had to be written would somehow get itself written.
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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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Smile As you find a rhythm Working you, slow mile by mile, Into your proper haunt.