A Quote by Seamus Heaney

The gift of writing is to be self-forgetful...

Seamus Heaney

Quote Topics

Forgetful Gift Self Writing

Quote Author

Seamus Heaney
Irish - Poet
April 13, 1939 - August 30, 2013

The gift of writing is to be self-forgetful... to get a surge of inner life or inner supply or unexpected sense of empowerment, to be afloat, to be out of yourself.

Seamus Heaney

The gift of writing is to be self-forgetful, to get a surge of inner life or inner supply or unexpected sense of empowerment, to be afloat, to be out of yourself.

Seamus Heaney

No art is sunk in the self, but rather, in art the self becomes self-forgetful in order to meet the demands of the thing seen and the thing being made.

Flannery O'Connor

Writing is an extreme privilege but it's also a gift. It's a gift to yourself and it's a gift of giving a story to someone.

Amy Tan

The rose does not have a why; it blossums without reason, forgetful of self and oblivious to our vision.

Angelus Silesius

Writing, for me, when I'm writing in the first-person, is like a form of acting. So as I'm writing, the character or self I'm writing about and my whole self - when I began the book - become entwined. It's soon hard to tell them apart. The voice I'm trying to explore directs my own perceptions and thoughts.

Sheila Heti

What one seems to want in art, in experiencing it, is the same thing that is necessary for its creation, a self-forgetful, perfectly useless concentration.

Elizabeth Bishop

First of all, all writing includes some part of the self. The relationship of the self and the other exists in writing, whether autobiographical or novel. There is a self and an other.

Nawal El Saadawi

I feel the greatest gift we can give to anybody is the gift of our honest self.

Fred Rogers

Old age is as forgetful as youth, and more incorrigible; it displays the same inattentiveness to conditions; its memory becomes self-repeating and degenerates into an instinctive reaction, like a bird's chirp.

George Santayana

Whoever has a spiritual gift and compassionate toward one who does not have it guards his gift through his compassion. But whoever is proud of his gift loses it through self-opinion.

Marcus Eremita

When I feel something very intensely or deeply or personally, I can go to extremes of self-expression or self-analysis by writing a poem - more than I can just talking to somebody or writing prose.

Jimmy Carter

By surviving passages of doubt and depression on the vocational journey, I have become clear about at least one thing: self-care is never a selfish act -- it is simply good stewardship of the only gift I have, the gift I was put on earth to offer to others. Anytime we can listen to true self and give it the care it requires, we do so not only for ourselves but for the many others whose lives we touch.