Seamus Heaney Quotes

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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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

I credit poetry for making this space-walk possible.

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

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.

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

Manifesting that order of poetry where we can at last grow up to that which we stored up as we grew.

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

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

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

Write whatever you like!

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.

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

I always believed that whatever had to be written would somehow get itself written.

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

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.

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

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

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

I'm a firm believer in learning by heart.

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

The gift of writing is to be self-forgetful, to get a surge of inner life or inner supply or unexpected sense of empowerment, to be afloat, to be out of yourself.

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.

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

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.

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.

Yeats was 18th-century oratory, almost.

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

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

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.

Eternal life can mean utter reverence for life itself.

In the United States, in poetry workshops, it's now quite a thing to make graduate students learn poems by heart.

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

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

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

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

The faking of feelings is a sin against the imagination.

Sonnet is about movement in a form.

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

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.

My passport's green.

History says, 'Don't hope on this side of the grave.'

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

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

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.

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