Quote

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

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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
Keep
Cry
Picking
Years
Sweet
Crying
Always
Wasn
Bush
Fermented
Would
Turn
Fairs
Smelt
Like
Knew
Lovely
Blackberry
Year
Fair
Blackberries
Turns
Flesh
Sour
Felt
Fruit
Hoped

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I drink to keep body and soul apart.
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Strange, it is a huge nothing that we fear.
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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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The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.
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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.
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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.
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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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I suppose I'm saying that defiance is actually part of the lyric job
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The end of art is peace.
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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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In off the moors, down through the mist beams, god-cursed Grendel came greedily loping.
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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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At home in Ireland, there's a habit of avoidance, an ironical attitude towards the authority figure.
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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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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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Behaviour that's admired is the path to power among people everywhere.
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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.
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As writers and readers, as sinners and citizens, our realism and our aesthetic sense make us wary of crediting the positive note.
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The dotted line my father's ashplant made On Sandymount Strand Is something else the tide won't wash away.
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