Seamus Heaney Short Quotes

25 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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
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