Quote

Sink every impulse like a bolt. Secure The bastion of sensation. Do not waver Into language. Do not waver in it.

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
Like
Bolts
Sensation
Sink
Sensations
Impulse
Secure
Bastion
Language
Waver
Every
Bolt

More quotes by Seamus Heaney

Image
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.
Seamus Heaney
Image
There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you.
Seamus Heaney
Image
I have begun to think of life as a series of ripples widening out from an original center.
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
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
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
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
The way we are living, timorous or bold, will have been our life.
Seamus Heaney
Image
I rhyme… to see myself, to set the darkness echoing.
Seamus Heaney
Image
Strange, it is a huge nothing that we fear.
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
Write whatever you like!
Seamus Heaney
Image
Memory has always been fundamental for me. In fact, remembering what I had forgotten is the way most of the poems get started.
Seamus Heaney
Image
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.
Seamus Heaney
Image
Harvard created wonderful conditions for me as a writerbut the writing was done, almost entirely, when I got home.
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 drink to keep body and soul apart.
Seamus Heaney
Image
Two buckets were easier carried than one. / I grew up in between.
Seamus Heaney
Image
I suppose I'm saying that defiance is actually part of the lyric job
Seamus Heaney
Image
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.
Seamus Heaney