68 quotes found
Poet · Irish · 1939–2013
Irish poet (1939–2013)
“Fate goes ever as fate must.”
“All I know is a door into the dark”
“I spend almost every morning with mail.”
“Poetry is more a threshold than a path.”
“Dont have the veins bulging in your biro.”
“It is always betterto avenge dear ones than to indulge in mourning.For every one of us, living in this worldmeans waiting for our end. Let whoever canwin glory before death. When a warrior is gone,...”
“History says, Dont hopeOn this side of the grave,But then, once in a lifetimeThe longed-for tidal waveOf justice can rise up,And hope and history rhyme”
“If you have the words, there's always a chance that you'll find the 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.”
“I rhymeTo see myself, to set the darkness echoing.”
“There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you. ”
“Since when," he asked,"Are the first line and last line of any poemWhere the poem begins and ends?”
“I suppose I'm saying that defiance is actually part of the lyric job”
“He sits, strong and blunt as a Celtic cross, Clearly used to silence and an armchair: Tonight the wife and children will be quiet At slammed door and smoker's cough in the hall.”
“DiggingBetween my finger and my thumb The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.Under my window, a clean rasping sound When the spade sinks into gravelly ground: My father, digging. I look downTill his st...”
“The main thing is to writefor the joy of it. Cultivate a work-lustthat imagines its haven like your hands at nightdreaming the sun in the sunspot of a breast.You are fasted now, light-headed, dange...”
“The way we are living,timorous or bold,will have been our life.”
“Sink every impulse like a bolt. Secure The bastion of sensation. Do not waver Into language. Do not waver in it.”
“words...To lure the tribal shoals to epigram / And order.”
“More than loud acclaim, I loveBooks, silence, thought, my alcove.Pangur BnPoem by Anon Irish Monk, Translated by Seamus Heaney”
“Mid-Term BreakI sat all morning in the college sick bayCounting bells knelling classes to a close.At two o'clock our neighbours drove me home.In the porch I met my father cryingHe had always taken ...”
“That was their way, their heathenish hope; deep in their hearts they remembered hell.”
“Believe that a further shore is reachable from here.”
