Top 99 Seamus Heaney Quotes

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

Eternal life can mean utter reverence for life itself.

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

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

I suppose you inevitably fall into habits of expression.

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

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

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

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

I believe we are put here to improve civilisation.

Memory has always been fundamental for me. In fact, remembering what I had forgotten is the way most of the poems get started.

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

Poetry is a domestic art, most itself when most at home.

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

Poems that come swiftly are usually the ones that you keep.

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.

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

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.

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

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

Write whatever you like!

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.

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

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.

Dylan Thomas is now as much a case history as a chapter in the history of poetry.

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.

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.

There’s never going to be a united Ireland, you know.

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

Dylan Thomas is now as much a case history as a chapter in the history of poetry.

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

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

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

I’ve been in the habit of helping people.

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.

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

It is very true to say that work done by writers is quite often an attempt to give solid expression to that which is bothering them… They feel they have got it right if they express the stress.

In my early teens, I acquired a kind of representative status: went on behalf of the family to wakes and funerals and so on. And I would be counted on as an adult contributor when it came to farm work – the hay in the summertime, for example.

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.

The faking of feelings is a sin against the imagination.

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

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

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.

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

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 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.

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

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.

I came from a farming background, and my career was teaching.

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.

As a young poet, you need corroboration, and that’s what publication does.

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.

Write whatever you like!

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.

In a way, Anglo-Saxon poetry cannot be translated.

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.

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

One doesn’t want one’s identity coerced.

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.

You yourself don’t have to be shaken by mortal danger in order to feel your mortality.

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

In my early teens, I acquired a kind of representative status: went on behalf of the family to wakes and funerals and so on. And I would be counted on as an adult contributor when it came to farm work – the hay in the summertime, for example.

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.

In a war situation or where violence and injustice are prevalent, poetry is called upon to be something more than a thing of beauty.

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.

You can have Irish identity in the north and also have your Irish passport.

The murder of Sean Brown hurt my soul.

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

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

I have always thought of poems as stepping stones in one’s own sense of oneself. Every now and again, you write a poem that gives you self-respect and steadies your going a little bit farther out in the stream. At the same time, you have to conjure the next stepping stone because the stream, we hope, keeps flowing.

Your temperament is what you write with, but it’s also how you deal with the world.

The end of art is peace.

The murder of Sean Brown hurt my soul.

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

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.