Seamus Heaney Quotes
Collection of top 100 famous quotes about Seamus Heaney
Seamus Heaney Quotes & Sayings
Happy to read and share the best inspirational Seamus Heaney quotes, sayings and quotations on Wise Famous Quotes.
Don't have the veins bulging in your biro.
— Seamus Heaney
Poetry is what we do to break bread with the dead.
— Seamus Heaney
For now that it was gone, it all seemed Far stranger: more fantastical than Pharaoh. And he was changed: a foreigner among them.
— Seamus Heaney
I credit poetry for making this space-walk possible.
— Seamus Heaney
In a war situation or where violence and injustice are prevalent, poetry is called upon to be something more than a thing of beauty.
— Seamus Heaney
Strange, it is a huge nothing that we fear.
— Seamus Heaney
Suspect too much sweet talk but never close your mind.
— Seamus Heaney
Write whatever you like!
— Seamus Heaney
A public expectation, it has to be said, not of poetry as such but of political positions variously approvable by mutually disapproving groups.
— Seamus Heaney
I spend almost every morning with mail.
— Seamus Heaney
I'm a firm believer in learning by heart.
— Seamus Heaney
I suppose you could say my father's world was Thomas Hardy and my mother's D.H. Lawrence.
— Seamus Heaney
I've nothing against the Queen personally. I had lunch at the Palace once upon a time.
— Seamus Heaney
There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you.
— Seamus Heaney
I have begun to think of life as a series of ripples widening out from an original center.
— Seamus Heaney
In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself.
— Seamus Heaney
Anyone with gumption and a sharp mind will take the measure of two things: what's said and what's done.
— Seamus Heaney
The next move is always the test.
— Seamus Heaney
I came from a farming background, and my career was teaching.
— Seamus Heaney
I believe we are put here to improve civilisation.
— Seamus Heaney
You had to come back to learn how to lose yourself, to be pilot and stray-witch, Hansel and Gretel in one.
— Seamus Heaney
I think of Dermot Healy as the heir to Patrick Kavanagh.
— Seamus Heaney
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.
— Seamus Heaney
Poetry is a domestic art, most itself when most at home.
— Seamus Heaney
The completely solitary self: that's where poetry comes from, and it gets isolated by crisis, and those crises are often very intimate also.
— Seamus Heaney
The kind of poet who founds and reconstitutes values is somebody like Yeats or Whitman - these are public value-founders.
— Seamus Heaney
By God, the old man could handle a spade.Just like his old man. — Seamus Heaney
It's difficult to learn poems off by heart that don't rhyme.
— Seamus Heaney
In my writing, I strive for a lyrical beauty somewhere between Tolkien at his best and Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf
— Christopher Paolini
At home in Ireland, there's a habit of avoidance, an ironical attitude towards the authority figure.
— Seamus Heaney
I drink to keep body and soul apart.
— Seamus Heaney
How perilous is it to choose not to love the life we're shown?
— Seamus Heaney
In a way, Anglo-Saxon poetry cannot be translated.
— Seamus Heaney
Words ... To lure the tribal shoals to epigram / And order.
— Seamus Heaney
Which would be better, what sticks or what falls through? Or does the choice itself create the value?
— Seamus Heaney
I'm very conscious that people dear to me are alive in my imagination - poets in particular.
— Seamus Heaney
Fate goes ever as fate must.
— Seamus Heaney
Wherever that man went, he went gratefully.
— Seamus Heaney
Yeats was 18th-century oratory, almost.
— Seamus Heaney
You yourself don't have to be shaken by mortal danger in order to feel your mortality.
— Seamus Heaney
Believe that further shoreIs reachable from here.
Believe in miracle
And cures and healing wells. — Seamus Heaney
As writers and readers, as sinners and citizens, our realism and our aesthetic sense make us wary of crediting the positive note.
— Seamus Heaney
So whether he calls it spirit music or not, I don't care. He took it out of wind off mid-Atlantic.
— Seamus Heaney
Poems that come swiftly are usually the ones that you keep.
— Seamus Heaney
Poetry is more a threshold than a path.
— Seamus Heaney
What I've said before, only half in joke, is that everybody in Ireland is famous. Or, maybe better, say everybody is familiar.
— Seamus Heaney
The murder of Sean Brown hurt my soul.
— Seamus Heaney
Sink every impulse like a bolt. Secure The bastion of sensation. Do not waver
Into language. Do not waver in it. — Seamus Heaney
Let whoever can win glory before death.
— Seamus Heaney
The poet is on the side of undeceiving the world.
— Seamus Heaney
I'm not personally obsessed with death. At a certain age, the light that you live in is inhabited by the shades - it 'tis.
— Seamus Heaney
The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.
— Seamus Heaney
I shall gain glory or die.
— Seamus Heaney
I think of the bog as a feminine goddess-ridden ground, rather like the territory of Ireland itself.
— Seamus Heaney
The faking of feelings is a sin against the imagination.
— Seamus Heaney
Poetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to it.
— Seamus Heaney
Then I thought of the tribe whose dances never fail / For they keep dancing till they sight the deer.
— Seamus Heaney
One doesn't want one's identity coerced.
— Seamus Heaney
Since when," he asked,"Are the first line and last line of any poem
Where the poem begins and ends? — Seamus Heaney
The experiment of poetry, as far as I am concerned, happens when the poem carries you beyond where you could have reasonably expected to go.
— Seamus Heaney
To encounter 'Beowulf' is like taking a sledgehammer to a quarry face. You must bang in there.
— Seamus Heaney
If self is a location, so is love.
— Seamus Heaney
I can't think of a case where poems changed the world, but what they do is they change people's understanding of what's going on in the world.
— Seamus Heaney
I rhymeTo see myself, to set the darkness echoing. — Seamus Heaney
A four foot box, a foot for every year.
— Seamus Heaney
I suppose you inevitably fall into habits of expression.
— Seamus Heaney
There's never going to be a united Ireland, you know.
— Seamus Heaney
God is a foreman with certain definite views Who orders life in shifts of work and leisure.
— Seamus Heaney
If poetry and the arts do anything, they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness.
— Seamus Heaney
In off the moors, down through the mist beams, god-cursed Grendel came greedily loping.
— Seamus Heaney
All I know is a door into the dark
— Seamus Heaney
Anybody serious about poetry knows how hard it is to achieve anything worthwhile in it.
— Seamus Heaney
That was their way, their heathenish hope; deep in their hearts they remembered hell.
— Seamus Heaney
My passport's green.
— Seamus Heaney