Quote

If you have the words, there's always a chance that you'll find the way.

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
Find
Way
Always
Chance
Words

More quotes by 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 completely solitary self: that's where poetry comes from, and it gets isolated by crisis, and those crises are often very intimate also.
Seamus Heaney
Image
I suppose I did feel a certain public pressure always.
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
Poetry is language in orbit.
Seamus Heaney
Image
Between my finger and my thumb The squat pen rests snug as a gun. ~from the poem Digging
Seamus Heaney
Image
A public expectation, it has to be said, not of poetry as such but of political positions variously approvable by mutually disapproving groups.
Seamus Heaney
Image
But even so, none of the news of these world-spasms entered me as terror.
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
Suspect too much sweet talk but never close your mind.
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
Strange, it is a huge nothing that we fear.
Seamus Heaney
Image
I've always associated the moment of writing with a moment of lift, of joy, of unexpected reward.
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 always believed that whatever had to be written would somehow get itself written.
Seamus Heaney
Image
Once I was on the job, once I had got started, I felt safe enough, but the anticipation made me tense.
Seamus Heaney
Image
I might enjoy being an albatross, being able to glide for days and daydream for hundreds of miles along the thermals. And then being able to hang like an affliction round some people's necks.
Seamus Heaney
Image
I drink to keep body and soul apart.
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