Seamus Heaney Quotes

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

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

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.

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.

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

So hope for a great sea-change on the far side of revenge. Believe that further shore is reachable from here. Believe in miracles and cures and healing wells.

If self is a location, so is love.

Write whatever you like!

The gift of writing is to be self-forgetful...

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

Im a firm believer in learning by heart.

I suppose I'm saying that defiance is actually part of the lyric job

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

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.

It is difficult at times to repress the thought that history is about as instructive as an abattoir.

There is not built-in meaning to anything, we are free to add any meaning we choose to give it.

God is a foreman with certain definite views Who orders life in shifts of work and leisure.

The most exhilarating for the writer and the reader, are gift-things-poems which arrive on their own energy, poems that in William Shakespeare's term "slip" from you.

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

Smile As you find a rhythm Working you, slow mile by mile, Into your proper haunt.

Best to say that once a poem is finished I trust it to make its way, and I trust readers will find their way to it and through it, if the thing has got itself rightly expressed.

My teaching was animated by what I was reading and being excited by as a poet.

Anything Can Happen, on the other hand, is not only about the atrociousness of the September 11 attack, it is also a premonition of the deadly retaliation that was bound to come.

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 suppose I did feel a certain public pressure always.

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

Allow ourselves to do as Ram Dass said in his delicious phrase "Be Here Now." If you are here now you cannot fall into falsely constructed gender projections.

Part of my gradual education of myself has been to think that there is a deep relationship between the nature of the creature and the worth of the art.

My body was braille for the creeping influences.

In off the moors, down through the mist beams, god-cursed Grendel came greedily loping.

The bogholes might be Atlantic seepage. The wet centre is bottomless.

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

Once I was on the job, once I had got started, I felt safe enough, but the anticipation made me tense.

The appointment [in Harvard] gave me economic safety, writerly support, and intellectual self-respectplus eight months to myself every year.

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

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.

I shall gain glory or die.

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.

History says, Don’t hopeOn this side of the grave, But then, once in a lifetimeThe longed-for tidal waveOf justice can rise up, And hope and history rhyme

I rhymeTo see myself, to set the darkness echoing.

Since when, " he asked, "Are the first line and last line of any poemWhere the poem begins and ends?

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.

words...To lure the tribal shoals to epigram / And order.

Fate goes ever as fate must.

More than loud acclaim, I loveBooks, silence, thought, my alcove.Pangur BánPoem by Anon Irish Monk, Translated by Seamus Heaney

Don’t have the veins bulging in your biro.

And a young prince must be prudent like that, giving freely while his father livesso that afterwards, in age when fighting startssteadfast companions will stand by himand hold the line.

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

I spend almost every morning with mail.

I don't think my intelligence is naturally analytic or political.