Best 110 quotes of Seamus Heaney on MyQuotes

Seamus Heaney

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    Seamus Heaney

    Allow ourselves to do as Ram Dass said in his delicious phrase "Be Here Now." If you are here now you cannot fall into falsely constructed gender projections.

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    Seamus Heaney

    Anything Can Happen is also, incidentally, a poem that arose from teaching. I'd talked about the Horace Ode (I, 34) [on which the poem is based] in a lecture I gave at Harvard in the fall of 2000 entitled Bright Boltsand remembered it after the Twin Towers attack.

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    Seamus Heaney

    Anything Can Happen, on the other hand, is not only about the atrociousness of the September 11 attack, it is also a premonition of the deadly retaliation that was bound to come.

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    Seamus Heaney

    A public expectation, it has to be said, not of poetry as such but of political positions variously approvable by mutually disapproving groups.

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    Seamus Heaney

    As writers and readers, as sinners and citizens, our realism and our aesthetic sense make us wary of crediting the positive note.

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    Seamus Heaney

    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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    Seamus Heaney

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

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    Seamus Heaney

    Believe that a further shore is reachable from here.

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    Seamus Heaney

    Best to say that once a poem is finished I trust it to make its way, and I trust readers will find their way to it and through it, if the thing has got itself rightly expressed.

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    Seamus Heaney

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

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    Seamus Heaney

    But even so, none of the news of these world-spasms entered me as terror.

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    Seamus Heaney

    But that citizen's perception was also at one with the truth in recognizing that the very brutality of the means by which the IRA were pursuing change was destructive of the trust upon which new possibilities would have to be based.

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    Seamus Heaney

    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

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    Seamus Heaney

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

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    Seamus Heaney

    Even though Helen Vendler wasn't on the Harvard faculty when I came first in 1979, she was a guardian spirit; Robert Fitzgerald gave me the use of his study in Pusey Library. Monroe and Brenda Engel kept open house, Bob and Jana Kiely made me at home in Adams House. Then, too, in 1979, Frank Bidart, whom Id met in Dublin after the death of Robert Lowell he was over seeing Caroline Blackwood Frank brought me into his circle of friends, including Robert Pinsky and Alan Williamson.

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    Seamus Heaney

    Getting started, keeping going, getting started again - in art and in life, it seems to me this is the essential rhythm not only of achievement but of survival, the ground of convinced action, the basis of self-esteem and the guarantee of credibility in your lives, credibility to yourselves as well as to others.

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    Seamus Heaney

    God is a foreman with certain definite views Who orders life in shifts of work and leisure.

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    Seamus Heaney

    Harvard created wonderful conditions for me as a writerbut the writing was done, almost entirely, when I got home.

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    Seamus Heaney

    Harvard meant a lot in my writing life from the beginning, even though I didnt actually do much composition on the spot.

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    Seamus Heaney

    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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    Seamus Heaney

    Hope for a great sea-change timid to rebuke and too petty to forgive.

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    Seamus Heaney

    Hope is not optimism, which expects things to turn out well, but something rooted in the conviction that there is good worth working for.

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    Seamus Heaney

    I am not a playwright. A playwright would take "Antigone" and hit it a few clouts and knock it out of shape and restructure it. My versioning was strictly verbal.

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    Seamus Heaney

    I credit poetry for making this space-walk possible.

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    Seamus Heaney

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

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    Seamus Heaney

    I felt implicated in American affairs.Outraged at the blatant lies about Iraqs involvement in al Qaeda, at the regimes arrogance and stupidity, Guantnamo Bay and all the rest of it. But the poems at the start of District and Circle Anahorish 1944, The Aerodromearent particularly aimed as criticism. On the contrary, there's a recognition of the big contribution to world order made in Europe during World War II.

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    Seamus Heaney

    If poetry and the arts do anything, they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness.

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    Seamus Heaney

    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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    Seamus Heaney

    If self is a location, so is love.

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    Seamus Heaney

    I have always thought of poems as stepping stones in one's own sense of oneself. Every now and again, you write a poem that gives you self-respect and steadies your going a little bit farther out in the stream. At the same time, you have to conjure the next stepping stone because the stream, we hope, keeps flowing.

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    Seamus Heaney

    I have begun to think of life as a series of ripples widening out from an original center.

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    Seamus Heaney

    Im a firm believer in learning by heart.

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    Seamus Heaney

    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.

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    Seamus Heaney

    In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself.

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    Seamus Heaney

    Irish readers, British readers, American readers: is it odd that I haven't a clue about how differently they react? Or better say, I cannot find the words to describe my hunch about them.

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    Seamus Heaney

    I suppose I'm saying that defiance is actually part of the lyric job

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    Seamus Heaney

    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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    Seamus Heaney

    It is always better to avenge dear ones than to indulge in mourning. For every one of us, living in this world means waiting for our end. Let whoever can win glory before death. When a warrior is gone, that will be his best and only bulwark.

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    Seamus Heaney

    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.

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    Seamus Heaney

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

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    Seamus Heaney

    I've nothing against the Queen personally: I had lunch at the Palace once upon a time.

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    Seamus Heaney

    Memory has always been fundamental for me. In fact, remembering what I had forgotten is the way most of the poems get started.

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    Seamus Heaney

    My body was braille for the creeping influences.

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    Seamus Heaney

    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.

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    Seamus Heaney

    My teaching was animated by what I was reading and being excited by as a poet.

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    Seamus Heaney

    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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    Seamus Heaney

    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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    Seamus Heaney

    Nowadays, what an award gives is a sense of solidarity with the poetry guild, as it were: sustenance coming from the assent of your peers on the judging panel.

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    Seamus Heaney

    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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    Seamus Heaney

    Once off the bush The fruit fermented, the sweet flesh would turn sour. I always felt like crying. It wasn't fair That all the lovely canfuls smelt of rot. Each year I hoped they'd keep, knew they would not. -Blackberry picking