Quotes from Seamus Heaney

It all came back to me last night, stirredBy the sootfall of your things at bedtime,Your head-down, tail-up hunt in a bottom drawerFor the black plunge-line nightdress.

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.

Between my finger and my thumbThe squat pen rests.I'll dig with it.

In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself.

As writers and readers, as sinners and citizens, our realism and our aesthetic sense make us wary of crediting the positive note.

The completely solitary self: that's where poetry comes from, and it gets isolated by crisis, and those crises are often very intimate also.

The fact of the matter is that the most unexpected and miraculous thing in my life was the arrival in it of poetry itself - as a vocation and an elevation almost.

I suppose I'm saying that defiance is actually part of the lyric job

Believe that further shore Is reachable from here. Believe in miracle And cures and healing wells.

A four foot box, a foot for every year.

Believe that a further shore is reachable from here.

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

If you have the words, there's always a chance that you'll find the way.

How perilous is it to choose not to love the life we're shown?

By God, the old man could handle a spade. Just like his old man.

The dotted line my father's ashplant made On Sandymount Strand Is something else the tide won't wash away.

We want what the woman wanted in the prison queue in Leningrad, standing there with cold and whispering for fear, enduring the terror of Stalin's regime and asking the poet Anna Akhmatova if she could describe it all, if her art was equal to it.

We were small and thought we knew nothing Worth knowing. We thought words travelled the wires In the shiny pouches of raindrops, Each one seeded full with the light Of the sky, the gleam of the lines, and ourselves So infinitesimally scaled We could stream through the eye of a needle.

History says, Don't hope/On this side of the grave/But then, once in a lifetime/The longest-for tidal wave of justice can rise up/And hope and history rhyme./So hope for a great sea change/On the far side of revenge/Believe in miracles....

Over the waves, with the wind behind her and foam at her neck, she flew like a bird until her curved prow had covered the distance...

words...To lure the tribal shoals to epigram / And order.

More than loud acclaim, I love Books, silence, thought, my alcove. Pangur Bán Poem by Anon Irish Monk, Translated by Seamus Heaney

The 'voice of sanity' is getting hoarse.

I want away to the house of death, to my father under the low, clay roof.