"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, dangerou..."
- Seamus Heaney
"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 strai..."
"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."
"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 crying—He had always taken fu..."
"Fate goes ever as fate must."
"More than loud acclaim, I loveBooks, silence, thought, my alcove.Pangur BánPoem by Anon Irish Monk, Translated by Seamus Heaney"
"Believe that a further shore is reachable from here."
"That was their way, their heathenish hope; deep in their hearts they remembered hell."