Seamus Heaney Quotes
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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 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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I rhyme… to see myself, to set the darkness echoing.
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One of the very first poems I wrote was Docker That fist would drop a hammer on a Catholic and one of the sturdiest was Requiem for the Croppies, written 50 years after 1916 the year of the Easter Rising. Being responsible and what it means, what it demands, have indeed preoccupied me maybe too much. But this is it, this is the thing, this is what you're up against.
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Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.
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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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I have always thought of poems as stepping stones in one's own sense of oneself.
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I always believed that whatever had to be written would somehow get itself written.
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Strange, it is a huge nothing that we fear.
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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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The way we are living, timorous or bold, will have been our life.
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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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But even so, none of the news of these world-spasms entered me as terror.
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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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The end of art is peace.
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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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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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There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you.
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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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The external reality and inner dynamic of happenings in Northern Ireland between 1968 and 1974 were symptomatic of change, violent change admittedly, but change nevertheless, and for the minority living there, change had been long overdue.