Seamus Heaney Quotes
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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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Harvard created wonderful conditions for me as a writerbut the writing was done, almost entirely, when I got home.
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The ability to start out upon your own impulse is fundamental to the gift of keeping going upon your own terms. . . . Getting started, keeping going, getting started again in art and in life, it seems to me this is the essential rhythm.
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Smile As you find a rhythm Working you, slow mile by mile, Into your proper haunt.
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God is a foreman with certain definite views Who orders life in shifts of work and leisure.
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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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Poetry cannot afford to lose its fundamentally self-delighting inventiveness, its joy in being a process of language as well as a representation of things in the world.
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There is not built-in meaning to anything, we are free to add any meaning we choose to give it.
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When I was teaching, I gave a lot of my mind and anxiety to it. There was always something clenched and anxious in me until the classes were over.
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The fact of the matter is that the most unexpected and miraculous thing in my life was the arrival in it of poetry itself - as a vocation and an elevation almost.
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If self is a location, so is love.
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Walk on air against your better judgement.
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To begin with, I wanted that truth to life to possess a concrete reliability, and rejoiced most when the poem seemed most direct, an upfront representation of the world it stood in for or stood up for or stood its ground against.
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I suppose I did feel a certain public pressure always.