Seamus Heaney Quotes

56 Sourced Quotes

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

Seamus Heaney
Two rafters and a cross-tie on the slate Are the letters some call ah, some call ay. There are charts, there are headlines, there is a right Way to hold the pen and a wrong way. First it is 'copying out,' and then 'English' Marked correct with a little leaning hoe. Smells of inkwells rise in the classroom hush. A globe in the window tilts like a coloured O.

Seamus Heaney
It all came back to me last night, stirred By the sootfall of your things at bedtime, Your head-down, tail-up hunt in a bottom drawer For the black plunge-line nightdress.

Seamus Heaney
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.

Seamus Heaney
The ground itself is kind, black butter
Melting and opening underfoot,
Missing its last definition
By millions of years.

Seamus Heaney
Is there a life before death? That's chalked up
In Ballymurphy. Competence with pain,
Coherent miseries, a bite and sup,
We hug our little destiny again.

Seamus Heaney
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I'll dig with it.

Seamus Heaney
How culpable was he
That last night when he broke
Our tribe's complicity?
'Now you're supposed to be
An educated man,'
I hear him say. 'Puzzle me
The right answer to that one.'

Seamus Heaney
Poetry cannot afford to lose its fundamentally self-delighting inventiveness, its joy in being a process of language as well as a representation of things in the world.

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
And then the ox would lurch against the gong
And deaden it and I would feel my tongue
Like the dropped gangplank of a cattle truck,
Trampled and rattled, running piss and muck.

Seamus Heaney
And found myself thinking: if it were nowadays,
This is how Death would summon Everyman.

Seamus Heaney
The annals say: when the monks of Clonmacnoise
Were all at prayers inside the oratory
A ship appeared above them in the air.

Seamus Heaney
Passive
Suffering makes the world go round.
Peace on earth, men of good will, all that
Holds good as long as the balance holds,
The scales ride steady and the angels' strain
Prolongs itself at an unearthly pitch.

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

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
No death outside my immediate family has left me more bereft. No death in my lifetime has hurt poets more.

Seamus Heaney
Everywhere being nowhere,
who can prove
one place more than another?

Seamus Heaney
I shouldered a kind of manhood stepping in to lift the coffins of dead relations.

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.

Seamus Heaney
Once off the bush The fruit fermented, the sweet flesh would turn sour. I always felt like crying. It wasn't fair That all the lovely canfuls smelt of rot. Each year I hoped they'd keep, knew they would not. -Blackberry picking

Seamus Heaney
It has as much to do with the energy released by linguistic fission and fusion, with the buoyancy generated by cadence and tone and rhyme and stanza, as it has to do with the poem's
concerns or the poet's truthfulness.

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

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

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

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

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

Seamus Heaney
On the contrary, a trust in the staying power and travel-worthiness of such good should encourage us to credit the possibility of a world where respect for the validity of every tradition
will issue in the creation and maintenance of a salubrious political space.

Seamus Heaney
You lose more of yourself than you redeem Doing the decent thing.

Seamus Heaney