Quote

Even if the last move did not succeed, the inner command says move again.

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
Lasts
Last
Moving
Even
Command
Inner
Succeed
Move
Says

More quotes by Seamus Heaney

Image
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
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
Image
Poetry cannot afford to lose its fundamentally self-delighting inventiveness, its joy in being a process of language as well as a representation of things in the world.
Seamus Heaney
Image
Yet there are times when a deeper need enters, when we want the poem to be not only pleasurably right but compellingly wise, not only a surprising variation played upon the world, but a re-tuning of the world itself.
Seamus Heaney
Image
Wherever that man went, he went gratefully.
Seamus Heaney
Image
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.
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
If you have the words, there's always a chance that you'll find the way.
Seamus Heaney
Image
Suspect too much sweet talk but never close your mind.
Seamus Heaney
Image
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.
Seamus Heaney
Image
Two buckets were easier carried than one. / I grew up in between.
Seamus Heaney
Image
I have begun to think of life as a series of ripples widening out from an original center.
Seamus Heaney
Image
In off the moors, down through the mist beams, god-cursed Grendel came greedily loping.
Seamus Heaney
Image
I've nothing against the Queen personally: I had lunch at the Palace once upon a time.
Seamus Heaney
Image
At home in Ireland, there's a habit of avoidance, an ironical attitude towards the authority figure.
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
The way we are living, timorous or bold, will have been our life.
Seamus Heaney
Image
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.
Seamus Heaney
Image
I've always associated the moment of writing with a moment of lift, of joy, of unexpected reward.
Seamus Heaney
Image
I rhyme… to see myself, to set the darkness echoing.
Seamus Heaney