Seamus Heaney Quotes
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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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I rhyme… to see myself, to set the darkness echoing.
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If self is a location, so is love.
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Behaviour that's admired is the path to power among people everywhere.
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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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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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Publication is rather like pushing the boat out; then the boat/book turns into a melting ice floe and you have to conjure a second boat which again turns into a melting floe under your feet. All the stepping stones that you conjure disappear under the water behind you.
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Without needing to be theoretically instructed, consciousness quickly realizes that it is the site of variously contending discourses.
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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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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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I shall gain glory or die.
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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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If poetry and the arts do anything, they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness.
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The dotted line my father's ashplant made On Sandymount Strand Is something else the tide won't wash away.
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Don't be surprised if I demur, for, be advised my passport's green.
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The most exhilarating for the writer and the reader, are gift-things-poems which arrive on their own energy, poems that in William Shakespeare's term "slip" from you.
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The bogholes might be Atlantic seepage. The wet centre is bottomless.
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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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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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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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You had to come back to learn how to lose yourself, to be pilot and stray-witch, Hansel and Gretel in one.
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There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you.
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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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My body was braille for the creeping influences.
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Write whatever you like!
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The thing about writing is that if you have the impulse, you will find the time.
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Walk on air against your better judgement.
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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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I've nothing against the Queen personally: I had lunch at the Palace once upon a time.
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Sink every impulse like a bolt. Secure The bastion of sensation. Do not waver Into language. Do not waver in it.
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