Seamus Heaney Quotes - Page 2

• Seamus Heaney / Poet

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

• Seamus Heaney / Poet

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

• Seamus Heaney / Poet

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

• Seamus Heaney / Poet

Hope for a great sea-change timid to rebuke and too petty to forgive.

• Seamus Heaney / Poet

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

• Seamus Heaney / Poet

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

• Seamus Heaney / Poet

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

• Seamus Heaney / Poet

If you have the words, there's always a chance that you'll find the way.

• Seamus Heaney / Poet

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

• Seamus Heaney / Poet

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

• Seamus Heaney / Poet

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

• Seamus Heaney / Poet

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

• Seamus Heaney / Poet

I think childhood is, generally speaking, a preparation for disappointment.

• Seamus Heaney / Poet

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

• Seamus Heaney / Poet

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

• Seamus Heaney / Poet

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

• Seamus Heaney / Poet

I have always thought of poems as stepping stones in one's own sense of oneself.

• Seamus Heaney / Poet

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

• Seamus Heaney / Poet

We go to poetry, we go to literature in general, to be forwarded within ourselves.

• Seamus Heaney / Poet

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

• Seamus Heaney / Poet

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

• Seamus Heaney / Poet

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

• Seamus Heaney / Poet

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

• Seamus Heaney / Poet

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

• Seamus Heaney / Poet

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

• Seamus Heaney / Poet

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

• Seamus Heaney / Poet

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

• Seamus Heaney / Poet

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

• Seamus Heaney / Poet

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

• Seamus Heaney / Poet

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

• Seamus Heaney / Poet

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

• Seamus Heaney / Poet

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

• Seamus Heaney / Poet

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

• Seamus Heaney / Poet

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

• Seamus Heaney / Poet

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

• Seamus Heaney / Poet

To encounter 'Beowulf' is like taking a sledgehammer to a quarry face. You must bang in there.

• Seamus Heaney / Poet

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

• Seamus Heaney / Poet

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

• Seamus Heaney / Poet

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

• Seamus Heaney / Poet

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

• Seamus Heaney / Poet

I think of the bog as a feminine goddess-ridden ground, rather like the territory of Ireland itself.

• Seamus Heaney / Poet

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

• Seamus Heaney / Poet

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

• Seamus Heaney / Poet

Anyone with gumption and a sharp mind will take the measure of two things: what's said and what's done.

• Seamus Heaney / Poet

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

• Seamus Heaney / Poet

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

• Seamus Heaney / Poet

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

• Seamus Heaney / Poet

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

• Seamus Heaney / Poet

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

• Seamus Heaney / Poet

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