Quote

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

Seamus Heaney

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Seamus Heaney
Age: 74 †
Born: 1939
Born: April 13
Died: 2013
Died: August 30
Actor
Author
Linguist
Playwright
Poet
Translator
University Teacher
Writer
Seamus Justin Heaney
Seamus Heaney
Unexpected
Rewards
Joy
Moment
Moments
Associated
Writing
Lift
Always
Reward
Lifts

More quotes by Seamus Heaney

Image
The next move is always the test.
Seamus Heaney
Image
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.
Seamus Heaney
Image
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.
Seamus Heaney
Image
When I first encountered the name of the city of Stockholm, I little thought that I would ever visit it, never mind end up being welcomed to it as a guest of the Swedish Academy and the Nobel Foundation.
Seamus Heaney
Image
My body was braille for the creeping influences.
Seamus Heaney
Image
Between my finger and my thumb The squat pen rests snug as a gun. ~from the poem Digging
Seamus Heaney
Image
Now it’s high watermark and floodtide in the heart and time to go. The sea-nymphs in the spray will be the chorus now. What’s left to say? Suspect too much sweet-talk but never close your mind. It was a fortunate wind that blew me here. I leave half-ready to believe that a crippled trust might walk and the half-true rhyme is love.
Seamus Heaney
Image
I have always thought of poems as stepping stones in one's own sense of oneself.
Seamus Heaney
Image
Poetry is language in orbit.
Seamus Heaney
Image
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.
Seamus Heaney
Image
Strange, it is a huge nothing that we fear.
Seamus Heaney
Image
I always believed that whatever had to be written would somehow get itself written.
Seamus Heaney
Image
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.
Seamus Heaney
Image
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.
Seamus Heaney
Image
On the contrary, a trust in the staying power and travel-worthiness of such good should encourage us to credit the possibility of a world where respect for the validity of every tradition will issue in the creation and maintenance of a salubrious political space.
Seamus Heaney
Image
Behaviour that's admired is the path to power among people everywhere.
Seamus Heaney
Image
The dotted line my father's ashplant made On Sandymount Strand Is something else the tide won't wash away.
Seamus Heaney
Image
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.
Seamus Heaney
Image
Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.
Seamus Heaney
Image
Sink every impulse like a bolt. Secure The bastion of sensation. Do not waver Into language. Do not waver in it.
Seamus Heaney