Top 100 Quotes About Seamus Heaney
#1. 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
#2. Music and literature have always and continue to be massive influences. Writers such as Seamus Heaney and Frank McGuinness. I have always admired the humanitarians that I knew growing up in Derry whose influence steered me in the direction of some of the work that I have chosen in the past.
Bronagh Gallagher
#3. Often it seems that there are writers who are their best selves on the page. That Seamus Heaney was as genuine and deeply admirable in person as in his poems was to me a gift, then as now.
Natasha Trethewey
#4. In my writing, I strive for a lyrical beauty somewhere between Tolkien at his best and Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf
Christopher Paolini
#5. I suppose I'm saying that defiance is actually part of the lyric job
Seamus Heaney
#6. I've always associated the moment of writing with a moment of lift, of joy, of unexpected reward.
Seamus Heaney
#7. You can have Irish identity in the north and also have your Irish passport.
Seamus Heaney
#8. 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
#10. I've nothing against the Queen personally. I had lunch at the Palace once upon a time.
Seamus Heaney
#12. Believe that a further shore is reachable from here.
Seamus Heaney
#13. I cannot be weaned/Off the earth's long contour, her river-veins.
Seamus Heaney
#14. Since when," he asked,
"Are the first line and last line of any poem
Where the poem begins and ends?
Seamus Heaney
#15. Your temperament is what you write with, but it's also how you deal with the world.
Seamus Heaney
#17. For every one of us, living in this world
means waiting for our end.
Seamus Heaney
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. I think childhood is, generally speaking, a preparation for disappointment.
Seamus Heaney
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. I suppose you inevitably fall into habits of expression.
Seamus Heaney
#24. Was music once a proof of God's existence? As long as it admits things beyond measure, That supposition stands.
Seamus Heaney
#25. To encounter 'Beowulf' is like taking a sledgehammer to a quarry face. You must bang in there.
Seamus Heaney
#26. 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
#27. 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
#28. 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
#29. I credit poetry for making this space-walk possible.
Seamus Heaney
#30. I'm very conscious that people dear to me are alive in my imagination - poets in particular.
Seamus Heaney
#31. Smile As you find a rhythm Working you, slow mile by mile, Into your proper haunt.
Seamus Heaney
#33. It's difficult to learn poems off by heart that don't rhyme.
Seamus Heaney
#34. The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.
Seamus Heaney
#35. At home in Ireland, there's a habit of avoidance, an ironical attitude towards the authority figure.
Seamus Heaney
#36. In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself.
Seamus Heaney
#37. 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
#38. 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
#39. Then I thought of the tribe whose dances never fail / For they keep dancing till they sight the deer.
Seamus Heaney
#40. How perilous is it to choose not to love the life we're shown?
Seamus Heaney
#41. If poetry and the arts do anything, they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness.
Seamus Heaney
#43. 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
#45. 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
#46. 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
#47. 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
#48. 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
#49. 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
#52. 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
#53. In a way, Anglo-Saxon poetry cannot be translated.
Seamus Heaney
#54. 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
#55. I don't think my intelligence is naturally analytic or political.
Seamus Heaney
#56. 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
#57. My experience is that prose usually equals duty - last minute, overdue-deadline stuff or a panic lecture to be written.
Seamus Heaney
#59. By God, the old man could handle a spade.
Just like his old man.
Seamus Heaney
#60. Words ... To lure the tribal shoals to epigram / And order.
Seamus Heaney
#61. Suspect too much sweet talk but never close your mind.
Seamus Heaney
#62. My father was a creature of the archaic world, really. He would have been entirely at home in a Gaelic hill-fort. His side of the family, and the houses I associate with his side of the family, belonged to a traditional rural Ireland.
Seamus Heaney
#63. 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.
Seamus Heaney
#64. The bogholes might be Atlantic seepage.
The wet centre is bottomless.
Seamus Heaney
#65. I believe we are put here to improve civilisation.
Seamus Heaney
#66. 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
#68. The way we are living, timorous or bold, will have been our life.
Seamus Heaney
#69. The poet is on the side of undeceiving the world.
Seamus Heaney
#70. 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
#72. Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.
Seamus Heaney
#73. 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
#74. I suppose you could say my father's world was Thomas Hardy and my mother's D.H. Lawrence.
Seamus Heaney
#76. 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
#77. To work, her dumb lunge says,
is to move a certain mass
... through a certain distance,
is to pull your weight and feel
exact and equal to it.
Feel dragged upon. And buoyant.
Seamus Heaney
#78. Even if the last move did not succeed, the inner command says move again.
Seamus Heaney
#79. 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
#80. God is a foreman with certain definite views Who orders life in shifts of work and leisure.
Seamus Heaney
#81. 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
#82. 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
#83. 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
#84. The faking of feelings is a sin against the imagination.
Seamus Heaney
#85. 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
#86. Poetry cannot afford to lose its fundamentally self-delighting inventiveness, its joy in being a process of language as well as a representation of things in the world.
Seamus Heaney
#87. Dylan Thomas is now as much a case history as a chapter in the history of poetry.
Seamus Heaney
#89. Poetry is what we do to break bread with the dead.
Seamus Heaney
#91. Behaviour that's admired
is the path to power among people everywhere.
Seamus Heaney
#92. Anyone with gumption and a sharp mind will take the measure of two things: what's said and what's done.
Seamus Heaney
#93. I want away to the house of death, to my father under the low, clay roof.
Seamus Heaney
#94. Without needing to be theoretically instructed, consciousness quickly realizes that it is the site of variously contending discourses.
Seamus Heaney
#96. Love brought me that far by the hand, without The slightest doubt or irony, dry-eyed And knowledgeable, contrary as be damned; Then just kept standing there, not letting go.
Seamus Heaney
#97. Be advised my passport's green.
No glass of ours was ever raised
to toast the Queen.
Seamus Heaney
#98. 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
#99. 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
#100. As writers and readers, as sinners and citizens, our realism and our aesthetic sense make us wary of crediting the positive note.
Seamus Heaney
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