Quote

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

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
Learn
Gretel
Back
Hansel
Come
Stray
Pilot
Witch
Pilots
Lose
Loses

More quotes by Seamus Heaney

Image
Write whatever you like!
Seamus Heaney
Image
The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.
Seamus Heaney
Image
I shall gain glory or die.
Seamus Heaney
Image
Wherever that man went, he went gratefully.
Seamus Heaney
Image
Memory has always been fundamental for me. In fact, remembering what I had forgotten is the way most of the poems get started.
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
When I first encountered the name of the city of Stockholm, I little thought that I would ever visit it, never mind end up being welcomed to it as a guest of the Swedish Academy and the Nobel Foundation.
Seamus Heaney
Image
Strange, it is a huge nothing that we fear.
Seamus Heaney
Image
I drink to keep body and soul apart.
Seamus Heaney
Image
I rhyme… to see myself, to set the darkness echoing.
Seamus Heaney
Image
Even if the last move did not succeed, the inner command says move again.
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
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
The way we are living, timorous or bold, will have been our life.
Seamus Heaney
Image
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
Seamus Heaney
Image
But even so, none of the news of these world-spasms entered me as terror.
Seamus Heaney
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
If you have the words, there's always a chance that you'll find the way.
Seamus Heaney