Seamus Heaney Quotes - Page 2

If self is a location, so is love.

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.

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.

Two buckets were easier carried than one. / I grew up in between.

So hope for a great sea-change on the far side of revenge. Believe that further shore is reachable from here. Believe in miracles and cures and healing wells.

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.

All I know is a door into the dark

Don't be surprised if I demur, for, be advised my passport's green.

Debate doesn’t really change things. It gets you bogged in deeper. If you can address or reopen the subject with something new, something from a different angle, then there is some hope. ... People are suddenly gazing at something else and pausing for a moment. And for the duration of that gaze and pause, they are like reflectors of the totality of their own knowledge and/or ignorance. That’s something poetry can do for you, it can entrance you for a moment above the pool of your own consciousness and your own possibilities.

At home in Ireland, there's a habit of avoidance, an ironical attitude towards the authority figure.

Behaviour that's admired is the path to power among people everywhere.

I rhyme… to see myself, to set the darkness echoing.

The thing about writing is that if you have the impulse, you will find the time.

The next move is always the test.

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.

I've always associated the moment of writing with a moment of lift, of joy, of unexpected reward.

There is not built-in meaning to anything, we are free to add any meaning we choose to give it.

I don't miss teaching. I'm learning to take my time for myself.

I have always thought of poems as stepping stones in one's own sense of oneself.

I credit poetry for making this space-walk possible.

It is difficult at times to repress the thought that history is about as instructive as an abattoir; that Tacitus was right and that peace is merely the desolation left behind after the decisive operations of merciless power.

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.

Strange, it is a huge nothing that we fear.

Between my finger and my thumb The squat pen rests; snug as a gun. ~from the poem "Digging

There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you.