Top 100 Quotes About Seamus
#2. I suppose I'm saying that defiance is actually part of the lyric job
Seamus Heaney
#3. I've always associated the moment of writing with a moment of lift, of joy, of unexpected reward.
Seamus Heaney
#4. You can have Irish identity in the north and also have your Irish passport.
Seamus Heaney
#5. The day I entered St Columb's College, my parents bought me a Conway Stewart pen. It was a special afternoon, of course. We were going to be parting that evening; they were aware of it, I was aware of it, nothing much was said about it.
Seamus Heaney
#7. I used to love stage above all, but that was when I was a single man. As I get older, the time commitment gets harder for theatre.
Seamus Dever
#8. It looks like a Grim if you do this," Seamus Finnigan said, with his eyes almost shut, "but it looks more like a donkey from here," he said, leaning to the left.
J.K. Rowling
#10. I've nothing against the Queen personally. I had lunch at the Palace once upon a time.
Seamus Heaney
#13. Believe that a further shore is reachable from here.
Seamus Heaney
#14. I cannot be weaned/Off the earth's long contour, her river-veins.
Seamus Heaney
#15. Since when," he asked,
"Are the first line and last line of any poem
Where the poem begins and ends?
Seamus Heaney
#16. Your temperament is what you write with, but it's also how you deal with the world.
Seamus Heaney
#18. For every one of us, living in this world
means waiting for our end.
Seamus Heaney
#19. I think, retrospectivety helps to hone your ideas for future projects. I like it.
Seamus McGarvey
#20. The experiment of poetry, as far as I am concerned, happens when the poem carries you beyond where you could have reasonably expected to go.
Seamus Heaney
#21. It has as much to do with the energy released by linguistic fission and fusion, with the buoyancy generated by cadence and tone and rhyme and stanza, as it has to do with the poem's
concerns or the poet's truthfulness.
Seamus Heaney
#22. I think childhood is, generally speaking, a preparation for disappointment.
Seamus Heaney
#23. And a young prince must be prudent like that,
giving freely while his father lives
so that afterwards, in age when fighting starts
steadfast companions will stand by him
and hold the line.
Seamus Heaney
#24. Seamus can't be the king to my queen. Because he's a saint. And no one measures up to a saint.
Kim Holden
#25. The experimental poetry thing is not my thing. It's a programme of the avant-garde: basically a refusal of the kind of poetry I write.
Seamus Heaney
#26. Bubotubers," Professor Sprout told them briskly. "They need squeezing. You will collect the pus - "
"The what?" said Seamus Finnigan, sounding revolted.
"Pus, Finnigan, pus," said Professor Sprout.
J.K. Rowling
#27. I suppose you inevitably fall into habits of expression.
Seamus Heaney
#28. Was music once a proof of God's existence? As long as it admits things beyond measure, That supposition stands.
Seamus Heaney
#29. To encounter 'Beowulf' is like taking a sledgehammer to a quarry face. You must bang in there.
Seamus Heaney
#30. Hung in the scales
with beauty and atrocity:
with the Dying Gaul
too strictly compassed
on his shield
with the actual weight
of each hooded victim,
slashed and dumped.
Seamus Heaney
#31. My language and my sensibility are yearning to admit a kind of religious or transcendent dimension. But then there's the reality: there's no Heaven, no afterlife of the sort we were promised, and no personal God.
Seamus Heaney
#32. Is there life before death? That's chalked up
In Ballymurphy. Competence with pain,
Coherent miseries, a bite and a sup,
We hug our little destiny again.
Seamus Heaney
#33. I credit poetry for making this space-walk possible.
Seamus Heaney
#34. I'm very conscious that people dear to me are alive in my imagination - poets in particular.
Seamus Heaney
#35. Smile As you find a rhythm Working you, slow mile by mile, Into your proper haunt.
Seamus Heaney
#36. The ending of partition was inevitable because Ireland was one nation by history and tradition , by facts of race, geography, and economy
Seamus Costello
#38. It's difficult to learn poems off by heart that don't rhyme.
Seamus Heaney
#39. I wanted to shoot the sex scenes unadorned so that the actors could really live in the moment.
Seamus McGarvey
#40. The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.
Seamus Heaney
#41. At home in Ireland, there's a habit of avoidance, an ironical attitude towards the authority figure.
Seamus Heaney
#42. In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself.
Seamus Heaney
#43. Was he, after all, really a bad man doing a brilliant impersonation of an idiot? It was hard to tell. The connections between stupidity and malice were so tangled and so dense.
Edward St. Aubyn
#44. A lot of people just capitulate and say, "Well, that's just the way things are." I think that can be deadly for creative people.
Seamus Dever
#45. 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
Seamus Heaney
#46. Only the very stupid or the very deprived can any longer help knowing that the documents of civilization have been written in blood and tears, blood and tears no less real for being very remote.
Seamus Heaney
#47. Then I thought of the tribe whose dances never fail / For they keep dancing till they sight the deer.
Seamus Heaney
#48. How perilous is it to choose not to love the life we're shown?
Seamus Heaney
#49. If poetry and the arts do anything, they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness.
Seamus Heaney
#51. I would say that something important for me and for my generation in Northern Ireland was the 1947 Education Act, which allowed students who won scholarships to go on to secondary schools and thence to university.
Seamus Heaney
#53. The Heaneys were aristocrats, in the sense that they took for granted a code of behavior that was given and unspoken. Argumentation, persuasion, speech itself, for God's sake, just seemed otiose and superfluous to them.
Seamus Heaney
#54. Hope is not optimism, which expects things to turn out well, but something rooted in the conviction that there is good worth working for.
Seamus Heaney
#55. I've said it before about the Nobel Prize: it's like being struck by a more or less benign avalanche. It was unexpected, unlooked for, and extraordinary.
Seamus Heaney
#56. 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.
Seamus Heaney
#57. 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.
Seamus Heaney
#60. In truth, I'm not really a cat person. Seamus, the wonder dog, still deeply mourned by all who knew him, was just about the only pet I've ever really loved.
Michael Dirda
#61. My point is there's a hidden Scotland in anyone who speaks the Northern Ireland speech. It's a terrific complicating factor, not just in Northern Ireland, but Ireland generally.
Seamus Heaney
#62. In a way, Anglo-Saxon poetry cannot be translated.
Seamus Heaney
#63. One of the best descriptions of the type of writer I am was given by Tom Paulin, who described himself as a 'binge' writer - like a binge drinker. I go on binges.
Seamus Heaney
#64. I don't think my intelligence is naturally analytic or political.
Seamus Heaney
#65. Each poet probably has his or her own cupboard of magnets. For some, it is cars; for others, works of art, or certain patterns of form or sound; for others, certain stories or places, Philip Levine's Detroit, Gwendolyn Brooks's Chicago, Seamus Heaney's time-tunneled, familied Ireland.
Jane Hirshfield
#66. Desmond O'Grady is one of the senior figures in Irish
Literary life, exemplary in the way he has committed
himself over the decades to the vocation of poetry and
has lived selflessly for the art
Seamus Heaney
#67. My experience is that prose usually equals duty - last minute, overdue-deadline stuff or a panic lecture to be written.
Seamus Heaney
#69. By God, the old man could handle a spade.
Just like his old man.
Seamus Heaney
#70. My wife Juliana and I first saw Eurovision while on our honeymoon in Greece in 2006, and we were amazed by it. They basically recreate a music video onstage, and pyro cannons, LED video screens, background dancers, fireworks, costume changes, and wind machines are their tools.
Seamus Dever
#71. Seamus walked a direct line to Frank and handed him the gun, backwards, with the barrel open.
Amy Vansant
#72. Words ... To lure the tribal shoals to epigram / And order.
Seamus Heaney
#73. Suspect too much sweet talk but never close your mind.
Seamus Heaney
#75. My father was a creature of the archaic world, really. He would have been entirely at home in a Gaelic hill-fort. His side of the family, and the houses I associate with his side of the family, belonged to a traditional rural Ireland.
Seamus Heaney
#76. Since I was a schoolboy, I've been used to being recognized on the road by old and young, and being bantered with and, indeed, being taunted.
Seamus Heaney
#77. The bogholes might be Atlantic seepage.
The wet centre is bottomless.
Seamus Heaney
#78. I believe we are put here to improve civilisation.
Seamus Heaney
#79. Seamus: "I was wondering if you would like to go get some coffee"
Cara: "Well that depends ... do you like to take long walks?"
Seamus: "Yes"
Cara: "Do you like sex?"
Seamus: "Yeees"
Cara: "Then take a f***ing hike and leave me the hell alone.
Erin McCarthy
#80. Every time you read a poem aloud to yourself in the presence of others, you are reading it into yourself and them. Voice helps to carry words farther and deeper than the eye.
Seamus Heaney
#82. The way we are living, timorous or bold, will have been our life.
Seamus Heaney
#83. The poet is on the side of undeceiving the world.
Seamus Heaney
#84. 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.
Seamus Heaney
#86. Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.
Seamus Heaney
#87. 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.
Seamus Heaney
#88. I suppose you could say my father's world was Thomas Hardy and my mother's D.H. Lawrence.
Seamus Heaney
#90. 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.
Seamus Heaney
#91. To work, her dumb lunge says,
is to move a certain mass
... through a certain distance,
is to pull your weight and feel
exact and equal to it.
Feel dragged upon. And buoyant.
Seamus Heaney
#92. Even if the last move did not succeed, the inner command says move again.
Seamus Heaney
#93. Diodorus Siculus confessed
His gradual ease among the likes of this:
Murdered, forgotten, nameless, terrible
Beheaded girl, outstaring axe
And beatification, outstaring
What had begun to feel like reverence.
-Strange Fruit
Seamus Heaney
#94. Read or do not read, there is no try".
Seamus
#95. God is a foreman with certain definite views Who orders life in shifts of work and leisure.
Seamus Heaney
#96. It's hard to remain patient when it seems so debilitating to do so. The balance comes with staying ambitious while being patient.
Seamus Dever
#97. What I've said before, only half in joke, is that everybody in Ireland is famous. Or, maybe better, say everybody is familiar.
Seamus Heaney
#98. I always had a superstitious fear of setting up a too well-designed writing place and then finding that the writing had absconded.
Seamus Heaney
#99. 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
#100. The faking of feelings is a sin against the imagination.
Seamus Heaney
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