Seamus Heaney Quotes
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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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The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.
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I credit poetry for making this space-walk possible.
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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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Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.
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I rhyme… to see myself, to set the darkness echoing.
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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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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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I have always thought of poems as stepping stones in one's own sense of oneself.
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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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It is difficult at times to repress the thought that history is about as instructive as an abattoir.
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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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There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you.
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The end of art is peace.
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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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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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Im a firm believer in learning by heart.
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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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Yet there are times when a deeper need enters, when we want the poem to be not only pleasurably right but compellingly wise, not only a surprising variation played upon the world, but a re-tuning of the world itself.
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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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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