Seamus Heaney Quotes

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

Believe that a further shore is reachable from here.

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

The main thing is to writefor the joy of it. Cultivate a work-lustthat imagines its haven like your ...

To work, her dumb lunge says,is to move a certain mass...through a certain distance,is to pull your ...

I rhymeTo see myself, to set the darkness echoing.

It is always betterto avenge dear ones than to indulge in mourning.For every one of us, living in th...

And a young prince must be prudent like that,giving freely while his father livesso that afterwards,...

Fate goes ever as fate must.

That was their way, their heathenish hope; deep in their hearts they remembered hell.

Don’t have the veins bulging in your biro.

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

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

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

A public expectation, it has to be said, not of poetry as such but of political positions variously ...

The faking of feelings is a sin against the imagination.

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

The completely solitary self: that's where poetry comes from, and it gets isolated by crisis, and th...

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

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

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

The experimental poetry thing is not my thing. It's a programme of the avant-garde: basically a refu...

The experiment of poetry, as far as I am concerned, happens when the poem carries you beyond where y...

Mid-Term BreakI sat all morning in the college sick bayCounting bells knelling classes to a close.At...

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

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

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

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

Tom Sleigh's poetry is hard-earned and well founded. I great admire the way it refuses to cut emotio...

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

Poetry is more a threshold than a path.

He sits, strong and blunt as a Celtic cross, Clearly used to silence and an armchair: Tonight the wi...

I can't think of a case where poems changed the world, but what they do is they change people's unde...

It is a great wonderHow Almighty God in his magnificenceFavors our race with rank and scopeAnd the g...

But that citizen's perception was also at one with the truth in recognizing that the very brutality ...

Whether it be a matter of personal relations within a marriage or political initiatives within a pea...

History says, Don’t hopeOn this side of the grave,But then, once in a lifetimeThe longed-for tidal w...

In a war situation or where violence and injustice are prevalent, poetry is called upon to be someth...

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

The fact of the matter is that the most unexpected and miraculous thing in my life was the arrival i...

I'm a firm believer in learning by heart.

All I know is a door into the dark

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

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

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

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

DiggingBetween my finger and my thumb The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.Under my window, a clean ra...

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

Nowadays, what an award gives is a sense of solidarity with the poetry guild, as it were: sustenance...

I credit poetry for making this space-walk possible.

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

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

Poetry is what we do to break bread with the dead.

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

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

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

I spend almost every morning with mail.

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