Seamus Heaney
Eternal life can mean utter reverence for life itself.
Hope is not optimism, which expects things to turn out well, but something rooted in the conviction that there is good worth working for.Collection: Optimism
If you have the words, there's always a chance that you'll find the way.Collection: Way
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.Collection: Thinking
No bit of the natural world is more valuable or more vulnerable than the tree bit. Nothing is more like ourselves, standing upright, caught between heaven and earth, frail at the extremities, yet strong at the central trunk, and nothing is closer to us at the beginning and at the end, providing the timber boards that frame both the cradle and the coffin.Collection: Strong
Walk on air against your better judgement.Collection: Wisdom
History says, Don’t hope On this side of the grave, But then, once in a lifetime The longed-for tidal wave Of justice can rise up, And hope and history rhymeCollection: Justice
Anyone with gumption and a sharp mind will take the measure of two things: what's said and what's done.Collection: Epic Poems
Poetry is language in orbit.Collection: Art
I drink to keep body and soul apart.Collection: Soul
The way we are living, timorous or bold, will have been our life.Collection: Way
Not to Learn Irish is to miss the opportunity of understanding what life in this country has meant and could mean in a better future. It is to cut oneself off from ways of being at home. If we regard self-understanding, mutual understanding, imaginative enhancement, cultural diversity and a tolerant political atmosphereas a desirable attainments, we should remember that a knowledge of the Irish language is an essential element in their realisation.Collection: Country
Suspect too much sweet talk but never close your mind.Collection: Sweet
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.Collection: Distance
All I know is a door into the darkCollection: Dark
Debate doesn’t really change things. It gets you bogged in deeper. If you can address or reopen the subject with something new, something from a different angle, then there is some hope. ... People are suddenly gazing at something else and pausing for a moment. And for the duration of that gaze and pause, they are like reflectors of the totality of their own knowledge and/or ignorance. That’s something poetry can do for you, it can entrance you for a moment above the pool of your own consciousness and your own possibilities.Collection: Ignorance
It is difficult at times to repress the thought that history is about as instructive as an abattoir.Collection: History
The main thing is to write for the joy of it. Cultivate a work-lust that imagines its haven like your hands at night dreaming the sun in the sunspot of a breast. You are fasted now, light-headed, dangerous. Take off from here.Collection: Dream
I felt implicated in American affairs.Outraged at the blatant lies about Iraqs involvement in al Qaeda, at the regimes arrogance and stupidity, Guantnamo Bay and all the rest of it. But the poems at the start of District and Circle Anahorish 1944, The Aerodromearent particularly aimed as criticism. On the contrary, there's a recognition of the big contribution to world order made in Europe during World War II.Collection: War
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.Collection: Wise
When I was teaching, I gave a lot of my mind and anxiety to it. There was always something clenched and anxious in me until the classes were over.Collection: Teaching
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.Collection: People
A writer is not different from a reader, in that the common ragbag of orthodoxies and assumptions is what a poet has to work with as well.Collection: Different
It is always better to avenge dear ones than to indulge in mourning. For every one of us, living in this world means waiting for our end. Let whoever can win glory before death. When a warrior is gone, that will be his best and only bulwark.Collection: Mean
The gift of writing is to be self-forgetful...Collection: Writing
Smile As you find a rhythm Working you, slow mile by mile, Into your proper haunt.Collection: Smile
Even though Helen Vendler wasn't on the Harvard faculty when I came first in 1979, she was a guardian spirit; Robert Fitzgerald gave me the use of his study in Pusey Library. Monroe and Brenda Engel kept open house, Bob and Jana Kiely made me at home in Adams House. Then, too, in 1979, Frank Bidart, whom Id met in Dublin after the death of Robert Lowell he was over seeing Caroline Blackwood Frank brought me into his circle of friends, including Robert Pinsky and Alan Williamson.Collection: Home
God is a foreman with certain definite views Who orders life in shifts of work and leisure.Collection: God
Publication is rather like pushing the boat out; then the boat/book turns into a melting ice floe and you have to conjure a second boat which again turns into a melting floe under your feet. All the stepping stones that you conjure disappear under the water behind you.Collection: Book
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.Collection: Sweet
Sink every impulse like a bolt. Secure The bastion of sensation. Do not waver Into language. Do not waver in it.Collection: Language
The most exhilarating for the writer and the reader, are gift-things-poems which arrive on their own energy, poems that in William Shakespeare's term "slip" from you.Collection: Energy
Two buckets were easier carried than one. / I grew up in between.Collection: Two
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.Collection: Forgiveness
Wherever that man went, he went gratefully.Collection: Men
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.Collection: Writing
Im a firm believer in learning by heart.Collection: Heart
Don't be surprised if I demur, for, be advised my passport's green.Collection: Green
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.Collection: Effort
The next move is always the test.Collection: Moving
There is not built-in meaning to anything, we are free to add any meaning we choose to give it.Collection: Giving
The external reality and inner dynamic of happenings in Northern Ireland between 1968 and 1974 were symptomatic of change, violent change admittedly, but change nevertheless, and for the minority living there, change had been long overdue.Collection: Reality
I rhyme… to see myself, to set the darkness echoing.Collection: Poetry
If self is a location, so is love.Collection: Self