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

More quotes by Seamus Heaney

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I can't think of a case where poems changed the world, but what they do is they change people's understanding of what's going on in the world.
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The next move is always the test.
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Believe that a further shore is reachable from here.
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Even if the last move did not succeed, the inner command says move again.
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Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.
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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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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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Write whatever you like!
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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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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.
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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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I have begun to think of life as a series of ripples widening out from an original center.
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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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Between my finger and my thumb The squat pen rests snug as a gun. ~from the poem Digging
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Best to say that once a poem is finished I trust it to make its way, and I trust readers will find their way to it and through it, if the thing has got itself rightly expressed.
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Wherever that man went, he went gratefully.
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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.
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So hope for a great sea-change on the far side of revenge. Believe that further shore is reachable from here. Believe in miracles and cures and healing wells.
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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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