Quotes from Seamus Heaney

The gods do grant immunity, you see, To everybody except the true and the just.

finally the end arrives when the body he was lent collapses and falls prey to its death; ancestral possessions and the goods he hoarded are inherited by another who lets them go with a liberal hand.

Useless to think you'll park and capture it More thoroughly. You are neither here nor there, A hurry through which known and strange things pass As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways And catch the heart off guard and blow it open. "Postscript

A populace that is chloroformed day and night by TV stations like Fox News could do with inoculation by poetry. Obviously, poetry can't be administered like an injection, but it does constitute a boost to the capacity for discrimination and resistance.

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 rhyme.

But death is not easily escaped from by anyone: all of us with souls, earth-dwellers and children of men, must make our way to a destination already ordained where the body, after the banqueting, sleeps on its deathbed.

You can't just pluck your honour off a bush You didn't plant.

Oh, cursed is he who in time of trouble has to thrust his soul in the fire's embrace, forfeiting help; he has nowhere to turn. But blessed is he who after death can approach the Lord and find friendship in the Father's embrace.

So whether he calls it spirit music or not, I don't care. He took it out of wind off mid-Atlantic.

What do we say any more to conjure the salt of our earth? So much comes and is gone that should be crystal and kept, and amicable weathers that bring up the grain of things, their tang of season and store, are all the packing we'll get.

Le brouillard est ici un présage redouté mais l'éclair épelle la bonté universelle et durant les orages les parents suspendent aux arbres leurs enfants emmaillotés.

Every nail, claw-scale and spur, every spike and welt on the hand of that heathen brute was like barbed steel.

bolted down his blood and gorged on him in lumps, leaving the body utterly lifeless, eaten up...

There's a whole economy of kindness Possible in the world; befriend a friend And the chance of it's increased and multiplied.

The space we stood around had been emptied into us to keep

Behaviour that's admired is the path to power among people everywhere.

Worst is the man who has all the good advice And then because his nerve fails, fails to act In accordance with it, as a leader should. And equally to blame Is anyone who puts the personal Above the overall thing, puts friend Or family first.

and wailed aloud for their lord's decease. A Geat woman too sang out in grief; with hair bound up, she unburdened herself

Money has a long and sinister reach. It slips into the system, changes hands And starts to eat away at the foundations Of everything we stand for.

Then a powerful demon, a prowler through the dark, nursed a hard grievance. It harrowed him to hear the din of the loud banquet every day in the hall, the harp being struck and the clear song of a skilled poet telling with mastery of man's beginnings

There was no one else like him alive. In his day, he was the mightiest man on earth, high-born and powerful. He ordered a boat that would ply the waves. He announced his plan: to sail the swan's road and search out that king, the famous prince who needed defenders.

So you drive on to the frontier of writing where it happens again.

Beowulf is my name."" June 4, 2022 – 52.0% ""hand-to-hand is how it will be, a life-and-death fight with the fiend. Whichever one death fells must deem it a just judgement by God.

Terrible times. I managed to come through But I never healed. My whole life has been Just one long cruel parody.