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

Seamus Heaney

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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
Ripple
Life
Begun
Center
Originals
Original
Series
Widening
Think
Ripples
Thinking

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Harvard created wonderful conditions for me as a writerbut the writing was done, almost entirely, when I got home.
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Between my finger and my thumb The squat pen rests snug as a gun. ~from the poem Digging
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Even if the last move did not succeed, the inner command says move again.
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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.
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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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Strange, it is a huge nothing that we fear.
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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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My body was braille for the creeping influences.
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Wherever that man went, he went gratefully.
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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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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.
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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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The way we are living, timorous or bold, will have been our life.
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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.
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I always believed that whatever had to be written would somehow get itself written.
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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.
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If you have the words, there's always a chance that you'll find the way.
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In off the moors, down through the mist beams, god-cursed Grendel came greedily loping.
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I've always associated the moment of writing with a moment of lift, of joy, of unexpected reward.
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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
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