Top 100 Seamus Heaney Quotes
#1. I suppose I'm saying that defiance is actually part of the lyric job
Seamus Heaney
#2. I've always associated the moment of writing with a moment of lift, of joy, of unexpected reward.
Seamus Heaney
#3. The day I entered St Columb's College, my parents bought me a Conway Stewart pen. It was a special afternoon, of course. We were going to be parting that evening; they were aware of it, I was aware of it, nothing much was said about it.
Seamus Heaney
#5. I've nothing against the Queen personally. I had lunch at the Palace once upon a time.
Seamus Heaney
#7. Believe that a further shore is reachable from here.
Seamus Heaney
#8. I cannot be weaned/Off the earth's long contour, her river-veins.
Seamus Heaney
#9. Since when," he asked,
"Are the first line and last line of any poem
Where the poem begins and ends?
Seamus Heaney
#10. Your temperament is what you write with, but it's also how you deal with the world.
Seamus Heaney
#11. For every one of us, living in this world
means waiting for our end.
Seamus Heaney
#12. I think childhood is, generally speaking, a preparation for disappointment.
Seamus Heaney
#13. And a young prince must be prudent like that,
giving freely while his father lives
so that afterwards, in age when fighting starts
steadfast companions will stand by him
and hold the line.
Seamus Heaney
#14. Hung in the scales
with beauty and atrocity:
with the Dying Gaul
too strictly compassed
on his shield
with the actual weight
of each hooded victim,
slashed and dumped.
Seamus Heaney
#15. Is there life before death? That's chalked up
In Ballymurphy. Competence with pain,
Coherent miseries, a bite and a sup,
We hug our little destiny again.
Seamus Heaney
#16. Smile As you find a rhythm Working you, slow mile by mile, Into your proper haunt.
Seamus Heaney
#18. At home in Ireland, there's a habit of avoidance, an ironical attitude towards the authority figure.
Seamus Heaney
#19. History says, Don't hope
On this side of the grave,
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up,
And hope and history rhyme
Seamus Heaney
#20. Only the very stupid or the very deprived can any longer help knowing that the documents of civilization have been written in blood and tears, blood and tears no less real for being very remote.
Seamus Heaney
#21. Then I thought of the tribe whose dances never fail / For they keep dancing till they sight the deer.
Seamus Heaney
#22. How perilous is it to choose not to love the life we're shown?
Seamus Heaney
#24. The Heaneys were aristocrats, in the sense that they took for granted a code of behavior that was given and unspoken. Argumentation, persuasion, speech itself, for God's sake, just seemed otiose and superfluous to them.
Seamus Heaney
#25. The fact of the matter is that the most unexpected and miraculous thing in my life was the arrival in it of poetry itself - as a vocation and an elevation almost.
Seamus Heaney
#27. My point is there's a hidden Scotland in anyone who speaks the Northern Ireland speech. It's a terrific complicating factor, not just in Northern Ireland, but Ireland generally.
Seamus Heaney
#28. One of the best descriptions of the type of writer I am was given by Tom Paulin, who described himself as a 'binge' writer - like a binge drinker. I go on binges.
Seamus Heaney
#29. I don't think my intelligence is naturally analytic or political.
Seamus Heaney
#30. Desmond O'Grady is one of the senior figures in Irish
Literary life, exemplary in the way he has committed
himself over the decades to the vocation of poetry and
has lived selflessly for the art
Seamus Heaney
#32. Suspect too much sweet talk but never close your mind.
Seamus Heaney
#33. The bogholes might be Atlantic seepage.
The wet centre is bottomless.
Seamus Heaney
#34. Every time you read a poem aloud to yourself in the presence of others, you are reading it into yourself and them. Voice helps to carry words farther and deeper than the eye.
Seamus Heaney
#35. The way we are living, timorous or bold, will have been our life.
Seamus Heaney
#36. It is always better
to avenge dear ones than to indulge in mourning.
For every one of us, living in this world
means waiting for our end. Let whoever can
win glory before death. When a warrior is gone,
that will be his best and only bulwark.
Seamus Heaney
#38. Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.
Seamus Heaney
#39. 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
#40. Diodorus Siculus confessed
His gradual ease among the likes of this:
Murdered, forgotten, nameless, terrible
Beheaded girl, outstaring axe
And beatification, outstaring
What had begun to feel like reverence.
-Strange Fruit
Seamus Heaney
#41. God is a foreman with certain definite views Who orders life in shifts of work and leisure.
Seamus Heaney
#42. I always had a superstitious fear of setting up a too well-designed writing place and then finding that the writing had absconded.
Seamus Heaney
#43. On the contrary, a trust in the staying power and travel-worthiness of such good should encourage us to credit the possibility of a world where respect for the validity of every tradition
will issue in the creation and maintenance of a salubrious political space.
Seamus Heaney
#44. The faking of feelings is a sin against the imagination.
Seamus Heaney
#45. It is difficult at times to repress the thought that history is about as instructive as an abattoir; that Tacitus was right and that peace is merely the desolation left behind after the decisive operations of merciless power.
Seamus Heaney
#46. Poetry is what we do to break bread with the dead.
Seamus Heaney
#47. Behaviour that's admired
is the path to power among people everywhere.
Seamus Heaney
#48. Anyone with gumption and a sharp mind will take the measure of two things: what's said and what's done.
Seamus Heaney
#49. Without needing to be theoretically instructed, consciousness quickly realizes that it is the site of variously contending discourses.
Seamus Heaney
#50. 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
#51. If self is a location, so is love:
Bearings taken, markings, cardinal points,
Options, obstinacies, dug heels, and distance,
Here and there and now and then, a stance.
Seamus Heaney
#52. As writers and readers, as sinners and citizens, our realism and our aesthetic sense make us wary of crediting the positive note.
Seamus Heaney
#54. Memory has always been fundamental for me. In fact, remembering what I had forgotten is the way most of the poems get started.
Seamus Heaney
#55. And here is love
like a tinsmith's scoop
sunk past its glean
in the meal-bin
Sunlight
Seamus Heaney
#56. Anybody serious about poetry knows how hard it is to achieve anything worthwhile in it.
Seamus Heaney
#57. I rhyme
To see myself, to set the darkness echoing.
Seamus Heaney
#58. Nowadays, what an award gives is a sense of solidarity with the poetry guild, as it were: sustenance coming from the assent of your peers on the judging panel.
Seamus Heaney
#59. I have begun to think of life as a series of ripples widening out from an original center.
Seamus Heaney
#60. My father and mother had no sense of entitlement for their children.
Seamus Heaney
#62. 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
#63. Which would be better, what sticks or what falls through? Or does the choice itself create the value?
Seamus Heaney
#64. We talked about desire and being jealous,
Our conversation a loose single gown
Or a white picnic tablecloth spread out
Like a book of manners in the wilderness.
Seamus Heaney
#65. Eternal life can mean utter reverence for life itself.
Seamus Heaney
#66. 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
#67. Happy the man ... with a natural gift
for practising the right one [art] from the start
poetry, say, or fishing; whose nights are dreamless;
whose deep-sunk panoramas rise and pass
like daylight through the rod's eye or the nib's eye.
Seamus Heaney
#68. The amount of sensory material stored up or stored down in the brain's and the body's systems is inestimable. It's like a culture at the bottom of a jar, although it doesn't grow, I think, or help anything else to grow unless you find a way to reach it and touch it.
Seamus Heaney
#69. Two buckets were easier carried than one. / I grew up in between.
Seamus Heaney
#70. Believe that further shore
Is reachable from here.
Believe in miracle
And cures and healing wells.
Seamus Heaney
#71. I don't do as many readings as I used to. There was a time when I was on the road a lot more, at home in Ireland, in Britain, in Canada and the States, a time when I had more stamina and appetite for it.
Seamus Heaney
#72. There's never going to be a united Ireland, you know.
Seamus Heaney
#74. The kinds of truth that art gives us many, many times are small truths. They don't have the resonance of an encyclical from the Pope stating an eternal truth, but they partake of the quality of eternity. There is a sort of timeless delight in them.
Seamus Heaney
#75. The dotted line my father's ashplant made On Sandymount Strand Is something else the tide won't wash away.
Seamus Heaney
#76. Whether it be a matter of personal relations within a marriage or political initiatives within a peace process, there is no sure-fire do-it-yourself kit.
Seamus Heaney
#77. I think of Dermot Healy as the heir to Patrick Kavanagh.
Seamus Heaney
#78. I think that water is immediately interesting. It's just, as an element, it is full of life. It is associated with origin; it is bright - it reflects you.
Seamus Heaney
#79. Tom Sleigh's poetry is hard-earned and well founded. I great admire the way it refuses to cut emotional corners and yet achieves a sense of lyric absolution.
Seamus Heaney
#80. I am not a playwright. A playwright would take Antigone and hit it a few clouts and knock it out of shape and restructure it. My versioning was strictly verbal.
Seamus Heaney
#81. So whether he calls it spirit music or not, I don't care. He took it out of wind off mid-Atlantic.
Seamus Heaney
#82. If you go into an underground train in London - probably anywhere, but chiefly in London - there's that sense of almost entering a ghostly dimension. People are very still and quiet; they don't exchange many pleasantries.
Seamus Heaney
#83. A person from Northern Ireland is naturally cautious.
Seamus Heaney
#84. My body was braille for the creeping influences.
Seamus Heaney
#85. I feel myself part of something. Not only being part of a community but part of an actual moment and a movement of Irish writing and art. That sense of being part of the whole thing is the deepest joy.
Seamus Heaney
#86. 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
#87. Then as the years went on and my listening became more deliberate, I would climb up on an arm of our big sofa to get my ear closer to the wireless speaker.
Seamus Heaney
#88. I might enjoy being an albatross, being able to glide for days and daydream for hundreds of miles along the thermals. And then being able to hang like an affliction round some people's necks.
Seamus Heaney
#89. The problem as you get older ... is that you become more self-aware. At the same time, you have to surprise yourself. There's no way of arranging the surprise, so it is tricky.
Seamus Heaney
#90. The kind of poet who founds and reconstitutes values is somebody like Yeats or Whitman - these are public value-founders.
Seamus Heaney
#91. In Northern Ireland, helicopters are not usually used to promote poetry.
Seamus Heaney
#92. When I first encountered the name of the city of Stockholm, I little thought that I would ever visit it, never mind end up being welcomed to it as a guest of the Swedish Academy and the Nobel Foundation.
Seamus Heaney
#93. I came from a farming background, and my career was teaching.
Seamus Heaney
#94. 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
#95. In off the moors, down through the mist beams, god-cursed Grendel came greedily loping.
Seamus Heaney
#96. So hope for a great sea-change
On the far side of revenge.
Believe that further shore
Is reachable from here.
Believe in miracles
And cures and healing wells.
Seamus Heaney
#97. He sits, strong and blunt as a Celtic cross,
Clearly used to silence and an armchair:
Tonight the wife and children will be quiet
At slammed door and smoker's cough in the hall.
Seamus Heaney
#98. What do we say any more to conjure the salt of our earth? So much comes and is gone that should be crystal and kept, and amicable weathers that bring up the grain of things, their tang of season and store, are all the packing we'll get.
Seamus Heaney
#99. As a young poet, you need corroboration, and that's what publication does.
Seamus Heaney
#100. That was their way, their heathenish hope; deep in their hearts they remembered hell.
Seamus Heaney
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