Seamus Heaney Quotes

56 Sourced Quotes

The main thing is to write for the joy of it. Cultivate a work-lust that imagines its haven like your hands at night dreaming the sun in the sunspot of a breast. You are fasted now, light-headed, dangerous. Take off from here.

Seamus Heaney
The dotted line my father's ashplant made On Sandymount Strand Is something else the tide won't wash away.

Seamus Heaney
Yet there are times when a deeper need enters, when we want the poem to be not only pleasurably right but compellingly wise, not only a surprising variation played upon the world, but a re-tuning of the world itself.

Seamus Heaney
Don't be surprised
If I demur, for, be advised
My passport's green.
No glass of ours was ever raised
To toast The Queen.

Seamus Heaney
Generations of gifted northern poets have let the linguistic cat out of the sectarian bag, setting it free in the great street carnival of 'protholics and catestants'.

Seamus Heaney
Who would connive
in civilized outrage
yet understand the exact
and tribal, intimate revenge.

Seamus Heaney
Here is the News,
Said the absolute speaker. Between him and us
A great gulf was fixed where pronunciation
Reigned tyrannically

Seamus Heaney
And that moment when the bird sings very close To the music of what happens.

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

Seamus Heaney
We just sit tight while wind dives
And strafes invisibly. Space is a salvo,
We are bombarded by the empty air.
Strange, it is a huge nothing that we fear.

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.

Seamus Heaney
If revolution is the kicking down of a rotten door, evolution is more like pushing the stone from the mouth of the tomb. There is an Easter energy about it, a sense of arrival rather than wreckage.

Seamus Heaney
It is difficult at times to repress the thought that history is about as instructive as an abattoir.

Seamus Heaney
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.... 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.

Seamus Heaney
We are earthworms of the earth, and all that
has gone through us is what will be our trace.

Seamus Heaney
We have no prairies
To slice a big sun at evening –
Everywhere the eye concedes to
Encroaching horizon,
Is wooed into the cyclops' eye
Of a tarn.

Seamus Heaney
Two buckets were easier carried than one. / I grew up in between.

Seamus Heaney
All agog at the plasterer on his ladder
Skimming our gable and writing our name there
With his trowel point, letter by strange letter.

Seamus Heaney
Until, on Vinegar Hill, the fatal conclave.
Terraced thousands died, shaking scythes at cannon.

Seamus Heaney
Auden of the last years, when he had begun to resemble in his own person an ample, flopping, ambulatory volume of the OED in carpet slippers.

Seamus Heaney
The external reality and inner dynamic of happenings in Northern Ireland between 1968 and 1974 were symptomatic of change, violent change admittedly, but change nevertheless, and for the minority living there, change had been long overdue.

Seamus Heaney
To begin with, I wanted that truth to life to possess a concrete reliability, and rejoiced most when the poem seemed most direct, an upfront representation of the world it stood in for or stood up for or stood its ground against.

Seamus Heaney
Without needing to be theoretically instructed, consciousness quickly realizes that it is the site of variously contending discourses.

Seamus Heaney
Now it's high watermark and floodtide in the heart and time to go. The sea-nymphs in the spray will be the chorus now. What's left to say? Suspect too much sweet-talk but never close your mind. It was a fortunate wind that blew me here. I leave half-ready to believe that a crippled trust might walk and the half-true rhyme is love.

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.

Seamus Heaney
The famous
Northern reticence, the tight gag of place
And times: yes, yes. Of the 'wee six' I sing
Where to be saved you only must save face
And whatever you say, you say nothing.

Seamus Heaney