Seamus Heaney Quotes - 9quotes.com

Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement
Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.
Written by Seamus Heaney
Even if the last move did not succeed, the inner command says move again.
Written by Seamus Heaney
Whether it be a matter of personal relations within a marriage or political initiatives within a peace process, there is no sure-fire do-it-yourself kit.
Written by Seamus Heaney
There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you.
Written by Seamus Heaney
When I first encountered the name of the city of Stockholm, I little thought that I would ever visit it, never mind end up being welcomed to it as a guest of the Swedish Academy and the Nobel Foundation.
Written by Seamus Heaney
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.
Written by Seamus Heaney
I credit poetry for making this space-walk possible.
Written by 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.
Written by Seamus Heaney
Without needing to be theoretically instructed, consciousness quickly realizes that it is the site of variously contending discourses.
Written by Seamus Heaney
But that citizen's perception was also at one with the truth in recognizing that the very brutality of the means by which the IRA were pursuing change was destructive of the trust upon which new possibilities would have to be based.
Written by Seamus Heaney
As writers and readers, as sinners and citizens, our realism and our aesthetic sense make us wary of crediting the positive note.
Written by Seamus Heaney
Manifesting that order of poetry where we can at last grow up to that which we stored up as we grew.
Written by Seamus Heaney
The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.
Written by Seamus Heaney
In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself.
Written by 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.
Written by Seamus Heaney
Write whatever you like!
Written by Seamus Heaney
My point is there's a hidden Scotland in anyone who speaks the Northern Ireland speech. It's a terrific complicating factor, not just in Northern Ireland, but Ireland generally.
Written by Seamus Heaney
I've always associated the moment of writing with a moment of lift, of joy, of unexpected reward.
Written by Seamus Heaney
I always believed that whatever had to be written would somehow get itself written.
Written by Seamus Heaney
At home in Ireland, there's a habit of avoidance, an ironical attitude towards the authority figure.
Written by Seamus Heaney
The fact of the matter is that the most unexpected and miraculous thing in my life was the arrival in it of poetry itself - as a vocation and an elevation almost.
Written by Seamus Heaney
I suppose you could say my father's world was Thomas Hardy and my mother's D.H. Lawrence.
Written by Seamus Heaney
I have begun to think of life as a series of ripples widening out from an original center.
Written by Seamus Heaney
Poetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to it.
Written by Seamus Heaney
I'm a firm believer in learning by heart.
Written by Seamus Heaney
It's difficult to learn poems off by heart that don't rhyme.
Written by Seamus Heaney
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.
Written by Seamus Heaney
The amount of sensory material stored up or stored down in the brain's and the body's systems is inestimable. It's like a culture at the bottom of a jar, although it doesn't grow, I think, or help anything else to grow unless you find a way to reach it and touch it.
Written by Seamus Heaney
Anybody serious about poetry knows how hard it is to achieve anything worthwhile in it.
Written by 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.
Written by Seamus Heaney

Join our feeds to automatically receive the latest headlines, news, and information formatted for your club's website or news reader.

Social connect: