Seamus Heaney Quotes
Hope is not optimism, which expects things to turn out well, but something rooted in the conviction that there is good worth working for.
Believe that a further shore is reachable from here.
Anyone with gumption and a sharp mind will take the measure of two things: what's said and what's done.
I can't think of a case where poems changed the world, but what they do is they change people's understanding of what's going on in the world.
If you have the words, there's always a chance that you'll find the way.
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
I have begun to think of life as a series of ripples widening out from an original center.
At home in Ireland, there's a habit of avoidance, an ironical attitude towards the authority figure.
I might enjoy being an albatross, being able to glide for days and daydream for hundreds of miles along the thermals. And then being able to hang like an affliction round some people's necks.
Memory has always been fundamental for me. In fact, remembering what I had forgotten is the way most of the poems get started.
The gift of writing is to be self-forgetful... to get a surge of inner life or inner supply or unexpected sense of empowerment, to be afloat, to be out of yourself.
I've always associated the moment of writing with a moment of lift, of joy, of unexpected reward.
The aim of poetry and the poet is finally to be of service, to ply the effort of the individual into the larger work of the community as a whole.
My point is there's a hidden Scotland in anyone who speaks the Northern Ireland speech. It's a terrific complicating factor, not just in Northern Ireland, but Ireland generally.
Desmond O'Grady is one of the senior figures in Irish Literary life, exemplary in the way he has committed himself over the decades to the vocation of poetry and has lived selflessly for the art
In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself.
Without needing to be theoretically instructed, consciousness quickly realizes that it is the site of variously contending discourses.
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.
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.
Between my finger and my thumb The squat pen rests; snug as a gun. ~from the poem "Digging
As writers and readers, as sinners and citizens, our realism and our aesthetic sense make us wary of crediting the positive note.
You had to come back to learn how to lose yourself, to be pilot and stray-witch, Hansel and Gretel in one.
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.
A public expectation, it has to be said, not of poetry as such but of political positions variously approvable by mutually disapproving groups.
The completely solitary self: that's where poetry comes from, and it gets isolated by crisis, and those crises are often very intimate also.
Whether it be a matter of personal relations within a marriage or political initiatives within a peace process, there is no sure-fire do-it-yourself kit.
Sink every impulse like a bolt. Secure The bastion of sensation. Do not waver Into language. Do not waver in it.
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.
Then as the years went on and my listening became more deliberate, I would climb up on an arm of our big sofa to get my ear closer to the wireless speaker.