Seamus Heaney Quotes
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Hope for a great sea-change timid to rebuke and too petty to forgive.
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If self is a location, so is love: Bearings taken, markings, cardinal points, Options, obstinacies, dug heels, and distance, Here and there and now and then, a stance.
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The completely solitary self: that's where poetry comes from, and it gets isolated by crisis, and those crises are often very intimate also.
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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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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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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.
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I suppose I'm saying that defiance is actually part of the lyric job
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I shall gain glory or die.
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I have always thought of poems as stepping stones in one's own sense of oneself.
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There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you.
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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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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 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 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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Wherever that man went, he went gratefully.
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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.
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I always believed that whatever had to be written would somehow get itself written.
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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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Walk on air against your better judgement.
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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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Smile As you find a rhythm Working you, slow mile by mile, Into your proper haunt.
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But even so, none of the news of these world-spasms entered me as terror.