Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
Two buckets were easier carried than one. / I grew up in between.
Seamus Heaney
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
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
Grew
Two
Buckets
Carried
Easier
More quotes by Seamus Heaney
Loyalism, or Unionism, or Protestantism, or whatever you want to call it, in Northern Ireland - it operates not as a class system, but a caste system.
Seamus Heaney
The whole relationship between a writer's spiritual/emotional condition and the kind of wordstuff and form-making that's going on in his work is an interesting one. When I was an undergraduate, there was a glib notion around that there was no reason to suppose a bad man could be a good writer.
Seamus Heaney
I drink to keep body and soul apart.
Seamus Heaney
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
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
In off the moors, down through the mist beams, god-cursed Grendel came greedily loping.
Seamus Heaney
The end of art is peace.
Seamus Heaney
Walk on air against your better judgement.
Seamus Heaney
I always believed that whatever had to be written would somehow get itself written.
Seamus Heaney
I rhyme… to see myself, to set the darkness echoing.
Seamus Heaney
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
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
Even if the last move did not succeed, the inner command says move again.
Seamus Heaney
I've nothing against the Queen personally: I had lunch at the Palace once upon a time.
Seamus Heaney
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
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.
Seamus Heaney
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.
Seamus Heaney
But that citizen's perception was also at one with the truth in recognizing that the very brutality of the means by which the IRA were pursuing change was destructive of the trust upon which new possibilities would have to be based.
Seamus Heaney
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
Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.
Seamus Heaney