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You had to come back to learn how to lose yourself, to be pilot and stray-witch, Hansel and Gretel in one.

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
Pilot
Witch
Pilots
Lose
Loses
Learn
Gretel
Back
Hansel
Come
Stray

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The dotted line my father's ashplant made On Sandymount Strand Is something else the tide won't wash away.
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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.
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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.
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I rhyme… to see myself, to set the darkness echoing.
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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.
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But even so, none of the news of these world-spasms entered me as terror.
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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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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.
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Write whatever you like!
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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.
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My body was braille for the creeping influences.
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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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Even if the last move did not succeed, the inner command says move again.
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Strange, it is a huge nothing that we fear.
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Poetry is language in orbit.
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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
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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
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If you have the words, there's always a chance that you'll find the way.
Seamus Heaney
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Believe that a further shore is reachable from here.
Seamus Heaney
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At home in Ireland, there's a habit of avoidance, an ironical attitude towards the authority figure.
Seamus Heaney