Seamus Heaney Quotes

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

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

No bit of the natural world is more valuable or more vulnerable than the tree bit. Nothing is more like ourselves, standing upright, caught between heaven and earth, frail at the extremities, yet strong at the central trunk, and nothing is closer to us at the beginning and at the end, providing the timber boards that frame both the cradle and the coffin.

Im a firm believer in learning by heart.

Harvard meant a lot in my writing life from the beginning, even though I didnt actually do much composition on the spot.

I suppose I did feel a certain public pressure always.

The thing about writing is that if you have the impulse, you will find the time.

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.

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

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

Now it’s high watermark and floodtide in the heart and time to go. The sea-nymphs in the spray will be the chorus now. What’s left to say? Suspect too much sweet-talk but never close your mind. It was a fortunate wind that blew me here. I leave half-ready to believe that a crippled trust might walk and the half-true rhyme is love.

The external reality and inner dynamic of happenings in Northern Ireland between 1968 and 1974 were symptomatic of change, violent change admittedly, but change nevertheless, and for the minority living there, change had been long overdue.

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

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.

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

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

All I know is a door into the dark

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.

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.

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.

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

Once off the bush The fruit fermented, the sweet flesh would turn sour. I always felt like crying. It wasn't fair That all the lovely canfuls smelt of rot. Each year I hoped they'd keep, knew they would not. -Blackberry picking

Between my finger and my thumb The squat pen rests; snug as a gun. ~from the poem "Digging

Strange, it is a huge nothing that we fear.

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.

Harvard created wonderful conditions for me as a writerbut the writing was done, almost entirely, when I got home.

When I was teaching, I gave a lot of my mind and anxiety to it. There was always something clenched and anxious in me until the classes were over.

The whole relationship between a writer's spiritual/emotional condition and the kind of wordstuff and form-making that's going on in his work is an interesting one. When I was an undergraduate, there was a glib notion around that there was no reason to suppose a bad man could be a good writer.

Suspect too much sweet talk but never close your mind.

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.

I drink to keep body and soul apart.

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

Irish readers, British readers, American readers: is it odd that I haven't a clue about how differently they react? Or better say, I cannot find the words to describe my hunch about them.

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

Publication is rather like pushing the boat out; then the boat/book turns into a melting ice floe and you have to conjure a second boat which again turns into a melting floe under your feet. All the stepping stones that you conjure disappear under the water behind you.

Write whatever you like!

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

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

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

If self is a location, so is love.

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.

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.

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

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.

The end of art is peace.

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

But even so, none of the news of these world-spasms entered me as terror.

Yet there are times when a deeper need enters, when we want the poem to be not only pleasurably right but compellingly wise, not only a surprising variation played upon the world, but a re-tuning of the world itself.