Top 100 Heaney's Quotes
#1. In my writing, I strive for a lyrical beauty somewhere between Tolkien at his best and Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf
Christopher Paolini
#2. Each poet probably has his or her own cupboard of magnets. For some, it is cars; for others, works of art, or certain patterns of form or sound; for others, certain stories or places, Philip Levine's Detroit, Gwendolyn Brooks's Chicago, Seamus Heaney's time-tunneled, familied Ireland.
Jane Hirshfield
#3. And here is love
like a tinsmith's scoop
sunk past its glean
in the meal-bin
Sunlight
Seamus Heaney
#4. Hope is not optimism, which expects things to turn out well, but something rooted in the conviction that there is good worth working for.
Seamus Heaney
#5. 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
#6. Be advised my passport's green.
No glass of ours was ever raised
to toast the Queen.
Seamus Heaney
#7. Anyone with gumption and a sharp mind will take the measure of two things: what's said and what's done.
Seamus Heaney
#8. Behaviour that's admired
is the path to power among people everywhere.
Seamus Heaney
#9. Maintenance of peaceful group relations is VERY important to us authoritative single people. It's because we care, and maybe just a little because we're afraid of uncontrollable events.
Katie Heaney
#10. I suppose you could say my father's world was Thomas Hardy and my mother's D.H. Lawrence.
Seamus Heaney
#12. By God, the old man could handle a spade.
Just like his old man.
Seamus Heaney
#14. My experience is that prose usually equals duty - last minute, overdue-deadline stuff or a panic lecture to be written.
Seamus Heaney
#15. 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
#16. I don't think my intelligence is naturally analytic or political.
Seamus Heaney
#17. 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
#18. In a way, Anglo-Saxon poetry cannot be translated.
Seamus Heaney
#19. 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
#20. Because six-year-olds don't have real interests aside from double Dutch and Pizza Lunchables.
Katie Heaney
#23. The main thing is to write
for the joy of it. Cultivate a work-lust
that imagines its haven like your hands at night
dreaming the sun in the sunspot of a breast.
You are fasted now, light-headed, dangerous.
Take off from here.
Seamus Heaney
#24. 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
#25. I've said it before about the Nobel Prize: it's like being struck by a more or less benign avalanche. It was unexpected, unlooked for, and extraordinary.
Seamus Heaney
#27. We want what the woman wanted in the prison queue in Leningrad, standing there with cold and whispering for fear, enduring the terror of Stalin's regime and asking the poet Anna Akhmatova if she could describe it all, if her art was equal to it.
Seamus Heaney
#28. There are a lot of things wrong with this particular approach to getting your girlfriend to agree to reenter a relationship with you. Probably the biggest problem is that it's a PowerPoint presentation.
Katie Heaney
#29. As a young poet, you need corroboration, and that's what publication does.
Seamus Heaney
#30. But that citizen's perception was also at one with the truth in recognizing that the very brutality of the means by which the IRA were pursuing change was destructive of the trust upon which new possibilities would have to be based.
Seamus Heaney
#31. Don't be surprised if I demur, for, be advised my passport's green.
Seamus Heaney
#32. 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
#33. I just had never occured to me to think that anything inherent to me was to blame for the things that went wrong (or the things that never even happened at all) with the other guys before him. Maybe it was all the time I'd had to decide I was cool and good and worthy without anyone else's help.
Katie Heaney
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. If you have the words, there's always a chance that you'll find the way.
Seamus Heaney
#37. This would feel truer if I hadn't been shut down by quite so many wrong people that I, despite my allegedly high standards, chased after. In any case, it's a nice thought.
Katie Heaney
#38. 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
#39. 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
#40. I can't be in love with every hot movie star; it's exhausting.
Katie Heaney
#41. 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
#42. In the United States, in poetry workshops, it's now quite a thing to make graduate students learn poems by heart.
Seamus Heaney
#43. The dotted line my father's ashplant made On Sandymount Strand Is something else the tide won't wash away.
Seamus Heaney
#44. There's never going to be a united Ireland, you know.
Seamus Heaney
#45. It doesn't matter how simple your name is; it's always a surprise to hear it spoken aloud by someone new, how the specific arrangement of syllables sounds coming out of their mouth.
Katie Heaney
#46. 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
#47. I mean, I always want everyone to kiss me, but I also don't want anyone to ever even think about trying any funny business because I swear to God I will yell and run. It's sort of hard to explain.
Katie Heaney
#48. I step through origins
like a dog turning
its memories of wilderness
on the kitchen mat:
the bog floor shakes,
water cheeps and lisps
as I walk down
rushes and heather.
I love this turf-face,
it's black incisions,
the cooped secrets
of process and ritual:
-Kinship
Seamus Heaney
#49. 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
#50. In fact, I think that's probably what the Bermuda Triangle is up to. It doesn't mean to do any harm, and it's actually pretty nice once you get to know it. It's just that Bermuda doesn't know how to handle itself when somebody sails into its territory, because that hardly ever happens.
Katie Heaney
#51. 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
#52. Since when," he asked,
"Are the first line and last line of any poem
Where the poem begins and ends?
Seamus Heaney
#53. Was music once a proof of God's existence? As long as it admits things beyond measure, That supposition stands.
Seamus Heaney
#54. I suppose you inevitably fall into habits of expression.
Seamus Heaney
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. I think childhood is, generally speaking, a preparation for disappointment.
Seamus Heaney
#58. It has as much to do with the energy released by linguistic fission and fusion, with the buoyancy generated by cadence and tone and rhyme and stanza, as it has to do with the poem's
concerns or the poet's truthfulness.
Seamus Heaney
#59. 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
#60. For every one of us, living in this world
means waiting for our end.
Seamus Heaney
#62. 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
#63. Your temperament is what you write with, but it's also how you deal with the world.
Seamus Heaney
#64. There were a couple of times when I hung out with a boy I liked and he paid for me and we were both single so I think those were dates, but then like a week later he had a girlfriend that wasn't me and I was cursing his very existence, so it's hard to say for sure.
Katie Heaney
#65. To encounter 'Beowulf' is like taking a sledgehammer to a quarry face. You must bang in there.
Seamus Heaney
#66. Falling in love is totally unimaginable to me. I think maybe the best things often are.
Katie Heaney
#67. I cannot be weaned/Off the earth's long contour, her river-veins.
Seamus Heaney
#68. Believe that a further shore is reachable from here.
Seamus Heaney
#70. I've nothing against the Queen personally. I had lunch at the Palace once upon a time.
Seamus Heaney
#71. If you only ever like people you don't know and who don't know you, the ball is perpetually in their court. Only they don't realize that you think they're playing basketball with you. They are not actually at the court. You think you're there. But really you're not there, either.
Katie Heaney
#73. 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
#74. You can have Irish identity in the north and also have your Irish passport.
Seamus Heaney
#75. I've always associated the moment of writing with a moment of lift, of joy, of unexpected reward.
Seamus Heaney
#76. I suppose I'm saying that defiance is actually part of the lyric job
Seamus Heaney
#77. At home in Ireland, there's a habit of avoidance, an ironical attitude towards the authority figure.
Seamus Heaney
#79. I would say that something important for me and for my generation in Northern Ireland was the 1947 Education Act, which allowed students who won scholarships to go on to secondary schools and thence to university.
Seamus Heaney
#81. If poetry and the arts do anything, they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness.
Seamus Heaney
#82. How perilous is it to choose not to love the life we're shown?
Seamus Heaney
#83. Then I thought of the tribe whose dances never fail / For they keep dancing till they sight the deer.
Seamus Heaney
#84. 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
#85. We look the way most late-high-school, early-college-age kids look in pictures they take of one another: stupid. Stupid, and thrilled to be wherever it is that we are, with whoever we are with, right at that moment. Andy
Katie Heaney
#86. 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
#87. You always forget that it's impossible to grieve every minute of the day. You always forget that a mourning period can include laughter, but just because it's there it won't mean that you're really okay.
Katie Heaney
#88. In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself.
Seamus Heaney
#89. 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
#90. The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.
Seamus Heaney
#91. It's difficult to learn poems off by heart that don't rhyme.
Seamus Heaney
#92. Anyway. That's not important. (It's kind of important.)
Katie Heaney
#94. Smile As you find a rhythm Working you, slow mile by mile, Into your proper haunt.
Seamus Heaney
#95. I'm very conscious that people dear to me are alive in my imagination - poets in particular.
Seamus Heaney
#96. I credit poetry for making this space-walk possible.
Seamus Heaney
#97. 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
#98. My language and my sensibility are yearning to admit a kind of religious or transcendent dimension. But then there's the reality: there's no Heaven, no afterlife of the sort we were promised, and no personal God.
Seamus Heaney
#99. 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
#100. It has often been hard for me to know if people are serious when they talk about making T-shirts. Just to be clear: Nobody ever means it, ever. Making and wearing matching, themed T-shirts is embarrassing. Unless you want to make some with me right now, or something.
Katie Heaney
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