Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
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
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
Well
Poetry
Self
Lose
Things
Joy
World
Loses
Delighting
Language
Inventiveness
Process
Fundamentally
Cannot
Representation
Wells
Afford
More quotes by Seamus Heaney
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.
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 have begun to think of life as a series of ripples widening out from an original center.
Seamus Heaney
My body was braille for the creeping influences.
Seamus Heaney
I shall gain glory or die.
Seamus Heaney
But even so, none of the news of these world-spasms entered me as terror.
Seamus Heaney
Between my finger and my thumb The squat pen rests snug as a gun. ~from the poem Digging
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 suppose I did feel a certain public pressure always.
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
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
Suspect too much sweet talk but never close your mind.
Seamus Heaney
Poetry is language in orbit.
Seamus Heaney
Even if the last move did not succeed, the inner command says move again.
Seamus Heaney
If you have the words, there's always a chance that you'll find the way.
Seamus Heaney
My point is there's a hidden Scotland in anyone who speaks the Northern Ireland speech. It's a terrific complicating factor, not just in Northern Ireland, but Ireland generally.
Seamus Heaney
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
Believe that a further shore is reachable from here.
Seamus Heaney
Yet there are times when a deeper need enters, when we want the poem to be not only pleasurably right but compellingly wise, not only a surprising variation played upon the world, but a re-tuning of the world itself.
Seamus Heaney
I've always associated the moment of writing with a moment of lift, of joy, of unexpected reward.
Seamus Heaney
