A Quote by Seamus Heaney

One of the very first poems I wrote was Docker That fist would drop a hammer on a Catholic and one of the sturdiest was Requiem for the Croppies, written 50 years after 1916 [the year of the Easter Rising]. Being responsible and what it means, what it demands, have indeed preoccupied me maybe too much. But this is it, this is the thing, this is what you're up against.

Seamus Heaney

Quote Topics

After Against Being Being Responsible Catholic Demands Drop Easter First Fist Hammer Indeed Maybe Me Means Much Poems Preoccupied Requiem Responsible Rising Thing Too Too Much Up Very Would Written Wrote Year Years

Quote Author

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

The song 'If I Had a Hammer' is geared toward people who don't have a hammer. Maybe before I had a hammer I thought I'd hammer in the morning and hammer in the evening. But once you get a hammer, you find you don't really hammer as much as you thought you would.

Ellen DeGeneres

I wrote those poems for myself, as a way of being a soldier here in this country. I didn't know the poems would travel. I didn't go to Lebanon until two years ago, but people told me that many Arabs had memorized these poems and translated them into Arabic.

June Jordan

My favorite Catholic holiday is Easter. For those of you that don't know, Easter is the day we celebrate Jesus rising from the grave and coming back to Earth as a rabbit that hides colored eggs.

Adam Ferrara

After I was 70, I realized that, 'Okay, I would like to have another 50 years, and I probably could.' But part of me is saying, 'Maybe I'm not going to have that much time.'

Yoko Ono

Some say that now that 50 years have passed, we would like another 50 more years to celebrate once again; that means it will be 100 years. After one hundred years, I will be 118 years old.

Bhumibol Adulyadej

For years I've known at some point it's very likely the shoe would drop. Maybe someone would guess that I'm trans. Maybe they would know me from my life before I transitioned.

Fallon Fox

I was fortunate enough to get a job at my alma mater, which brought me back to Indiana after being gone for twenty years. There is no way I would have written these poems had I not come back. They are 100% the product of the circumstances that led me home.

Adrian Matejka

I started writing when I was 26, so I don't even know what year that was. I wrote a script for me to star in. A friend of mine, who was an actor that I would compete against a lot, had written a script and was taking all these meetings. He just kept pushing me and was like, "You got to do it. You're going to love it!" He's a very successful screenwriter now. His name is Michael Bacall and he wrote 21 Jump Street, Project X, and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. So it was a few factors.

Danny Strong

You know, I think everybody I've seen has come from some other therapy, and almost invariably it's very much the same thing: the therapist is too disinterested, a little too aloof, a little too inactive. They're not really interested in the person, he doesn't relate to the person. All these things I've written so much about. That's why I've made such a practice really, over and over to hammer home the point of self-revelation and being more of yourself and showing yourself. Every book I write I want to get that in there.

Irvin D. Yalom

For about twenty years, if I managed to write ten or twelve poems in a year; I considered that a pretty successful year, but I wrote 'The Beforelife' within a year.

Franz Wright

I have to thank my mother for this. When I was a little boy she used to teach me poems. I would go in church and tell the poems in church for the Easter program, and again for Mother's Day and any occasion she felt would fit. I was very energetic with delivery at that time as a boy, so it stuck with me.

Rudy Ray Moore

In my own writing, I've mostly abandoned end-rhyme, but wordplay is still a huge part of my process. I've written a series of mermaid poems in the last few years. The first one was called "The Straightforward Mermaid" which arose from my delight in that word combination. After that, I decided that future mermaid poems would have to be words ending in "d" or "t," which led to "The Deadbeat Mermaid," "The Morbid Mermaid" and so forth . . .

Matthea Harvey

If I'm still wistful about On the Road, I look on the rest of the Kerouac oeuvre--the poems, the poems!--in horror. Read Satori in Paris lately? But if I had never read Jack Kerouac's horrendous poems, I never would have had the guts to write horrendous poems myself. I never would have signed up for Mrs. Safford's poetry class the spring of junior year, which led me to poetry readings, which introduced me to bad red wine, and after that it's all just one big blurry condemned path to journalism and San Francisco.

Sarah Vowell

I seriously doubt I would ever have written the first story had I not been a lawyer. I never dreamed of being a writer. I wrote only after witnessing a trial.

John Grisham

One of these poems I wrote after having been here only a month. The other, I wrote this morning. In the space between the two poems, I have found acres of grace