Quote

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

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
Might
Hang
Like
Round
Albatross
People
Rounds
Daydream
Miles
Glide
Along
Daydreaming
Days
Affliction
Enjoy
Necks
Able
Hundreds

More quotes by Seamus Heaney

Image
I always believed that whatever had to be written would somehow get itself written.
Seamus Heaney
Image
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.
Seamus Heaney
Image
Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.
Seamus Heaney
Image
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
Image
You had to come back to learn how to lose yourself, to be pilot and stray-witch, Hansel and Gretel in one.
Seamus Heaney
Image
Poetry is language in orbit.
Seamus Heaney
Image
I shall gain glory or die.
Seamus Heaney
Image
The aim of poetry and the poet is finally to be of service, to ply the effort of the individual into the larger work of the community as a whole.
Seamus Heaney
Image
Wherever that man went, he went gratefully.
Seamus Heaney
Image
Allow ourselves to do as Ram Dass said in his delicious phrase Be Here Now. If you are here now you cannot fall into falsely constructed gender projections.
Seamus Heaney
Image
There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you.
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
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.
Seamus Heaney
Image
Suspect too much sweet talk but never close your mind.
Seamus Heaney
Image
Behaviour that's admired is the path to power among people everywhere.
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 suppose I'm saying that defiance is actually part of the lyric job
Seamus Heaney
Image
My body was braille for the creeping influences.
Seamus Heaney
Image
In off the moors, down through the mist beams, god-cursed Grendel came greedily loping.
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