Heaney Quotes: top 100 famous quotes about Heaney

Heaney Quotes & Sayings

Happy to read and share the best inspirational Heaney quotes, sayings and quotations on Wise Famous Quotes.

For every one of us, living in this world
means waiting for our end. — Seamus Heaney

Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained. — Seamus Heaney

Poetry is what we do to break bread with the dead. — Seamus Heaney

For now that it was gone, it all seemed Far stranger: more fantastical than Pharaoh. And he was changed: a foreigner among them. — Seamus Heaney

Anyway. That's not important. (It's kind of important.) — Katie Heaney

I credit poetry for making this space-walk possible. — Seamus Heaney

I keep myself to myself. — Katie Heaney

In a war situation or where violence and injustice are prevalent, poetry is called upon to be something more than a thing of beauty. — Seamus Heaney

Strange, it is a huge nothing that we fear. — Seamus Heaney

Understand how all things are interconnected, including you. — Mehgan Heaney-Grier

If, by chance, you find that you are losing hope, tap back into those who inspire you. — Mehgan Heaney-Grier

Write whatever you like! — Seamus Heaney

A public expectation, it has to be said, not of poetry as such but of political positions variously approvable by mutually disapproving groups. — Seamus Heaney

I spend almost every morning with mail. — Seamus Heaney

I suppose you could say my father's world was Thomas Hardy and my mother's D.H. Lawrence. — Seamus Heaney

I've nothing against the Queen personally. I had lunch at the Palace once upon a time. — Seamus Heaney

There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you. — Seamus Heaney

I have begun to think of life as a series of ripples widening out from an original center. — Seamus Heaney

The bogholes might be Atlantic seepage.
The wet centre is bottomless. — Seamus Heaney

Anyone with gumption and a sharp mind will take the measure of two things: what's said and what's done. — Seamus Heaney

There are the boys for whom the ink of a million glittery gel pens was spilled. — Katie Heaney

The next move is always the test. — Seamus Heaney

If you have the words, there's always a chance that you'll find the way. — Seamus Heaney

I came from a farming background, and my career was teaching. — Seamus Heaney

Dylan Thomas is now as much a case history as a chapter in the history of poetry. — Seamus Heaney

In Northern Ireland, helicopters are not usually used to promote poetry. — Seamus Heaney

I believe we are put here to improve civilisation. — Seamus Heaney

I suppose I'm saying that defiance is actually part of the lyric job — Seamus Heaney

You had to come back to learn how to lose yourself, to be pilot and stray-witch, Hansel and Gretel in one. — Seamus Heaney

Alice Oswald. With Hughes and Heaney gone, people are looking around for the best British and Irish poets. Oswald is one of our finest. — Tobias Hill

Even if the last move did not succeed, the inner command says move again. — Seamus Heaney

I think of Dermot Healy as the heir to Patrick Kavanagh. — Seamus Heaney

In a way, Anglo-Saxon poetry cannot be translated. — Seamus Heaney

I think childhood is, generally speaking, a preparation for disappointment. — Seamus Heaney

In my writing, I strive for a lyrical beauty somewhere between Tolkien at his best and Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf — Christopher Paolini

God is a foreman with certain definite views Who orders life in shifts of work and leisure. — Seamus Heaney

I want away to the house of death, to my father under the low, clay roof. — Seamus Heaney

It's difficult to learn poems off by heart that don't rhyme. — Seamus Heaney

I drink to keep body and soul apart. — Seamus Heaney

The experiment of poetry, as far as I am concerned, happens when the poem carries you beyond where you could have reasonably expected to go. — Seamus Heaney

To encounter 'Beowulf' is like taking a sledgehammer to a quarry face. You must bang in there. — Seamus Heaney

I suppose you inevitably fall into habits of expression. — Seamus Heaney

The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine. — Seamus Heaney

If self is a location, so is love. — Seamus Heaney

The experimental poetry thing is not my thing. It's a programme of the avant-garde: basically a refusal of the kind of poetry I write. — Seamus Heaney

I rhyme
To see myself, to set the darkness echoing. — Seamus Heaney

Words ... To lure the tribal shoals to epigram / And order. — Seamus Heaney

The faking of feelings is a sin against the imagination. — Seamus Heaney

You yourself don't have to be shaken by mortal danger in order to feel your mortality. — Seamus Heaney

Believe that further shore
Is reachable from here.
Believe in miracle
And cures and healing wells. — Seamus Heaney

As writers and readers, as sinners and citizens, our realism and our aesthetic sense make us wary of crediting the positive note. — Seamus Heaney

So whether he calls it spirit music or not, I don't care. He took it out of wind off mid-Atlantic. — Seamus Heaney

Poems that come swiftly are usually the ones that you keep. — Seamus Heaney

You can have Irish identity in the north and also have your Irish passport. — Seamus Heaney

Yeats was 18th-century oratory, almost. — Seamus Heaney

Poetry is a domestic art, most itself when most at home. — Seamus Heaney

The completely solitary self: that's where poetry comes from, and it gets isolated by crisis, and those crises are often very intimate also. — Seamus Heaney

The kind of poet who founds and reconstitutes values is somebody like Yeats or Whitman - these are public value-founders. — Seamus Heaney

Never, ever lose hope. We must not lose hope. — Mehgan Heaney-Grier

By God, the old man could handle a spade.
Just like his old man. — Seamus Heaney

We went into the laser tag room, paranoid, delirious, and shot at one another. It was a little like Lord of the Flies but with more 98 Degrees. — Katie Heaney

At home in Ireland, there's a habit of avoidance, an ironical attitude towards the authority figure. — Seamus Heaney

How perilous is it to choose not to love the life we're shown? — Seamus Heaney

It was different than all the rest because I say it was. I felt it was. — Katie Heaney

All I give are fucks. And it seems to me that it might be nice, on occasion, to get rid of some of them. — Katie Heaney

My passport's green. — Seamus Heaney

My father and mother had no sense of entitlement for their children. — Seamus Heaney

I shall gain glory or die. — Seamus Heaney

Be advised my passport's green.
No glass of ours was ever raised
to toast the Queen. — Seamus Heaney

Poetry is more a threshold than a path. — Seamus Heaney

This is THE most romantic thing that has ever happened to me, and it involves both drugs and a toilet. — Katie Heaney

What I've said before, only half in joke, is that everybody in Ireland is famous. Or, maybe better, say everybody is familiar. — Seamus Heaney

The murder of Sean Brown hurt my soul. — Seamus Heaney

Think. Learn. Act. The more you know, the better and more educated choices you have the opportunity to make. — Mehgan Heaney-Grier

Sink every impulse like a bolt. Secure
The bastion of sensation. Do not waver
Into language. Do not waver in it. — Seamus Heaney

The way we are living, timorous or bold, will have been our life. — Seamus Heaney

Let whoever can win glory before death. — Seamus Heaney

The poet is on the side of undeceiving the world. — Seamus Heaney

I'm not personally obsessed with death. At a certain age, the light that you live in is inhabited by the shades - it 'tis. — Seamus Heaney

Girls are nothing to be afraid of, no matter the kind. Boys, on the other hand. — Katie Heaney

Two buckets were easier carried than one. / I grew up in between. — Seamus Heaney

I think of the bog as a feminine goddess-ridden ground, rather like the territory of Ireland itself. — Seamus Heaney

Then I thought of the tribe whose dances never fail / For they keep dancing till they sight the deer. — Seamus Heaney

A four foot box, a foot for every year. — Seamus Heaney

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. — Seamus Heaney

One doesn't want one's identity coerced. — Seamus Heaney

There's never going to be a united Ireland, you know. — Seamus Heaney

Since when," he asked,
"Are the first line and last line of any poem
Where the poem begins and ends? — Seamus Heaney

If poetry and the arts do anything, they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness. — Seamus Heaney

Falling in love is totally unimaginable to me. I think maybe the best things often are. — Katie Heaney

In poetry, everything can be faked but the intensity of utterance. — Seamus Heaney

But even so, none of the news of these world-spasms entered me as terror. — Seamus Heaney

In off the moors, down through the mist beams, god-cursed Grendel came greedily loping. — Seamus Heaney

All I know is a door into the dark — Seamus Heaney

It was because she was drinking a lot, choosing to do these things to be happy but never seeming all that happy the next day, or the one after that. — Katie Heaney

Anybody serious about poetry knows how hard it is to achieve anything worthwhile in it. — Seamus Heaney

That was their way, their heathenish hope; deep in their hearts they remembered hell. — Seamus Heaney

The aim of poetry and the poet is finally to be of service, to ply the effort of the individual into the larger work of the community as a whole. — Seamus Heaney

Poetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to it. — Seamus Heaney

Loyalism, or Unionism, or Protestantism, or whatever you want to call it, in Northern Ireland - it operates not as a class system, but a caste system. — Seamus Heaney