(31 quotes found)
“Don't be surprised if I demur, for, be advised my passport's green. No glass of ours was ever raised to toast The Queen.”
Seamus Heaney
“But the thing uttered by the speaker I strain towards is still not quite the story of what is going on; it is more reflexive than that, because as a poet I am in fact straining towards a strain, seeking repose in the stability conferred by a musically satisfying order of sounds.”
“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.”
“Getting started, keeping going, getting started again - in art and in life, it seems to me this is the essential rhythm not only of achievement but of survival, the ground of convinced action, the basis of self-esteem and the guarantee of credibility in your lives, credibility to yourselves as well as to others.”
“It is difficult at times to repress the thought that history is about as instructive as an abattoir; that Tacitus was right and that peace is merely the desolation left behind after the decisive operations of merciless power.”
“No place in the world prides itself more on its vigilance and realism, no place considers itself more qualified to censure any flourish of rhetoric or extravagance of aspiration.”
“As writers and readers, as sinners and citizens, our realism and our aesthetic sense make us wary of crediting the positive note.”
“The next move is always the test.”
“Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.”
“I may have grown more attentive to the news and more alive to the world history and world-sorrow behind it.”
