Top 187 Quotes & Sayings by Seamus Heaney - Page 2

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

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.

My experience is that prose usually equals duty - last minute, overdue-deadline stuff or a panic lecture to be written.

A person from Northern Ireland is naturally cautious.

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

I believe we are put here to improve civilisation.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

The group of writers I had grown up with in the '60s - Derek Mahon, Michael Longley, James Simmons, John Hewitt, Paul Muldoon - formed a very necessary and self-sustaining group.

One doesn't want one's identity coerced.

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.

Eternal life can mean utter reverence for life itself.

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

The kinds of truth that art gives us many, many times are small truths. They don't have the resonance of an encyclical from the Pope stating an eternal truth, but they partake of the quality of eternity. There is a sort of timeless delight in them.

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.

I suppose you inevitably fall into habits of expression.

If you go into an underground train in London - probably anywhere, but chiefly in London - there's that sense of almost entering a ghostly dimension. People are very still and quiet; they don't exchange many pleasantries.

I would say that something important for me and for my generation in Northern Ireland was the 1947 Education Act, which allowed students who won scholarships to go on to secondary schools and thence to university.

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.

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.

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

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

I've been in the habit of helping people.

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

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.

Since I was a schoolboy, I've been used to being recognized on the road by old and young, and being bantered with and, indeed, being taunted.

I think of Dermot Healy as the heir to Patrick Kavanagh.

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.

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

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.

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.

The murder of Sean Brown hurt my soul.

I think the first little jolt I got was reading Gerard Manley Hopkins - I liked other poems... but Hopkins was kind of electric for me - he changed the rules with speech, and the whole intensity of the language was there and so on.

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.

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

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

I always had a superstitious fear of setting up a too well-designed writing place and then finding that the writing had absconded.

Poetry is language in orbit.

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.

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

Not to Learn Irish is to miss the opportunity of understanding what life in this country has meant and could mean in a better future. It is to cut oneself off from ways of being at home. If we regard self-understanding, mutual understanding, imaginative enhancement, cultural diversity and a tolerant political atmosphereas a desirable attainments, we should remember that a knowledge of the Irish language is an essential element in their realisation.

Im a firm believer in learning by heart.

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.

I drink to keep body and soul apart.

History says, Don’t hope On this side of the grave, But then, once in a lifetime The longed-for tidal wave Of justice can rise up, And hope and history rhyme

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

Believe that a further shore is reachable from here.

The next move is always the test.

Debate doesn’t really change things. It gets you bogged in deeper. If you can address or reopen the subject with something new, something from a different angle, then there is some hope. ... People are suddenly gazing at something else and pausing for a moment. And for the duration of that gaze and pause, they are like reflectors of the totality of their own knowledge and/or ignorance. That’s something poetry can do for you, it can entrance you for a moment above the pool of your own consciousness and your own possibilities.

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

No bit of the natural world is more valuable or more vulnerable than the tree bit. Nothing is more like ourselves, standing upright, caught between heaven and earth, frail at the extremities, yet strong at the central trunk, and nothing is closer to us at the beginning and at the end, providing the timber boards that frame both the cradle and the coffin.

Walk on air against your better judgement.

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.

Hope is not optimism, which expects things to turn out well, but something rooted in the conviction that there is good worth working for.

All I know is a door into the dark