Quote

I have always thought of poems as stepping stones in one's own sense of oneself.

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
Stones
Oneself
Sense
Thought
Always
Stepping
Poems

More quotes by Seamus Heaney

Image
Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.
Seamus Heaney
Image
The dotted line my father's ashplant made On Sandymount Strand Is something else the tide won't wash away.
Seamus Heaney
Image
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
Image
My body was braille for the creeping influences.
Seamus Heaney
Image
Irish readers, British readers, American readers: is it odd that I haven't a clue about how differently they react? Or better say, I cannot find the words to describe my hunch about them.
Seamus Heaney
Image
Wherever that man went, he went gratefully.
Seamus Heaney
Image
I've always associated the moment of writing with a moment of lift, of joy, of unexpected reward.
Seamus Heaney
Image
The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.
Seamus Heaney
Image
Walk on air against your better judgement.
Seamus Heaney
Image
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
Image
I've nothing against the Queen personally: I had lunch at the Palace once upon a time.
Seamus Heaney
Image
But even so, none of the news of these world-spasms entered me as terror.
Seamus Heaney
Image
As writers and readers, as sinners and citizens, our realism and our aesthetic sense make us wary of crediting the positive note.
Seamus Heaney
Image
Write whatever you like!
Seamus Heaney
Image
Behaviour that's admired is the path to power among people everywhere.
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
There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you.
Seamus Heaney
Image
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.
Seamus Heaney
Image
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
Image
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