Seamus Heaney quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Seamus Heaney

Seamus Heaney Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Seamus Heaney on Wise Famous Quotes.

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

My body was braille for the creeping influences.

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

My experience is that prose usually equals duty - last minute, overdue-deadline stuff or a panic lecture to be written.

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

I credit poetry for making this space-walk possible.

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

A person from Northern Ireland is naturally cautious.

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.

Strange, it is a huge nothing that we fear.

Suspect too much sweet talk but never close your mind.

Write whatever you like!

I'm a firm believer in learning by heart.

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

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

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

And here is love
like a tinsmith's scoop
sunk past its glean
in the meal-bin
Sunlight

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

In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself.

The bogholes might be Atlantic seepage.
The wet centre is bottomless.

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

The next move is always the test.

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

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

Poetry is language in orbit.

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

Your temperament is what you write with, but it's also how you deal with the world.

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

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

We go to poetry, we go to literature in general, to be forwarded within ourselves.

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

Wherever that man went, he went gratefully.

Fate goes ever as fate must.

I've always associated the moment of writing with a moment of lift, of joy, of unexpected reward.

Anyone born and bred in Northern Ireland can't be too optimistic.

I cannot be weaned/Off the earth's long contour, her river-veins.

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

I always had a superstitious fear of setting up a too well-designed writing place and then finding that the writing had absconded.

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

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

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

Believe that a further shore is reachable from here.

I'm very conscious that people dear to me are alive in my imagination - poets in particular.

Smile As you find a rhythm Working you, slow mile by mile, Into your proper haunt.

I don't think my intelligence is naturally analytic or political.

Behaviour that's admired
is the path to power among people everywhere.

Sonnet is about movement in a form.

The dotted line my father's ashplant made On Sandymount Strand Is something else the tide won't wash away.

The end of art is peace.

You carried your own burden and very soon your symptoms of creeping privilege disappeared.

Hope is not optimism, which expects things to turn out well, but something rooted in the conviction that there is good worth working for.

Since I was a schoolboy, I've been used to being recognized on the road by old and young, and being bantered with and, indeed, being taunted.

Was music once a proof of God's existence? As long as it admits things beyond measure, That supposition stands.

As a young poet, you need corroboration, and that's what publication does.

I've been in the habit of helping people.

Eternal life can mean utter reverence for life itself.

Without needing to be theoretically instructed, consciousness quickly realizes that it is the site of variously contending discourses.

Don't be surprised if I demur, for, be advised my passport's green.

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

The murder of Sean Brown hurt my soul.

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

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

Let whoever can win glory before death.

The poet is on the side of undeceiving the world.

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

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

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

The faking of feelings is a sin against the imagination.

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

Poetry is more a threshold than a path.

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.

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

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

One doesn't want one's identity coerced.

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

I suppose you inevitably fall into habits of expression.

I drink to keep body and soul apart.

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

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

If self is a location, so is love.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

Yeats was 18th-century oratory, almost.

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

A four foot box, a foot for every year.

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

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

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

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

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

My passport's green.

I shall gain glory or die.