Top quotes by Seamus Heaney

Loyalism, or Unionism, or Protestantism, or whatever you want to call it, in Northern Ireland - it operates not as a class system, but a caste system. Votes: 28

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. Votes: 26

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. Votes: 20

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. Votes: 18

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. Votes: 15

In Northern Ireland, helicopters are not usually used to promote poetry. Votes: 14

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. Votes: 14

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. Votes: 13

In a way, Anglo-Saxon poetry cannot be translated. Votes: 12

Poetry is what we do to break bread with the dead. Votes: 11

I think that water is immediately interesting. It's just, as an element, it is full of life. It is associated with origin; it is bright - it reflects you. Votes: 11

My father and mother had no sense of entitlement for their children. Votes: 10

Poetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to it. Votes: 10

In a war situation or where violence and injustice are prevalent, poetry is called upon to be something more than a thing of beauty. Votes: 9

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. Votes: 9

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. Votes: 9

I'm not personally obsessed with death. At a certain age, the light that you live in is inhabited by the shades - it 'tis. Votes: 8

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. Votes: 8

If poetry and the arts do anything, they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness. Votes: 8

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. Votes: 7

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. Votes: 7

I spend almost every morning with mail. Votes: 7

Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained. Votes: 6

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. Votes: 5

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. Votes: 5

Poetry is more a threshold than a path. Votes: 5

I don't think my intelligence is naturally analytic or political. Votes: 2

As a young poet, you need corroboration, and that's what publication does. Votes: 2

I credit poetry for making this space-walk possible. Votes: 2

I came from a farming background, and my career was teaching. Votes: 1

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. Votes: 0

We go to poetry, we go to literature in general, to be forwarded within ourselves. Votes: 0

Poetry is a domestic art, most itself when most at home. Votes: 0

Anybody serious about poetry knows how hard it is to achieve anything worthwhile in it. Votes: 0

In poetry, everything can be faked but the intensity of utterance. Votes: 0

Dylan Thomas is now as much a case history as a chapter in the history of poetry. Votes: 0

In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself. Votes: 0

In the United States, in poetry workshops, it's now quite a thing to make graduate students learn poems by heart. Votes: 0

Manifesting that order of poetry where we can at last grow up to that which we stored up as we grew. Votes: 0

The completely solitary self: that's where poetry comes from, and it gets isolated by crisis, and those crises are often very intimate also. Votes: 0

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. Votes: 0

A public expectation, it has to be said, not of poetry as such but of political positions variously approvable by mutually disapproving groups. Votes: 0

The experiment of poetry, as far as I am concerned, happens when the poem carries you beyond where you could have reasonably expected to go. Votes: 0

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. Votes: 0

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. Votes: 0

I've been in the habit of helping people. Votes: 0

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. Votes: 0

I've said it before about the Nobel Prize: it's like being struck by a more or less benign avalanche. It was unexpected, unlooked for, and extraordinary. Votes: 0

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. Votes: 0

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. Votes: 0

What I've said before, only half in joke, is that everybody in Ireland is famous. Or, maybe better, say everybody is familiar. Votes: 0

Your temperament is what you write with, but it's also how you deal with the world. Votes: 0

I suppose you inevitably fall into habits of expression. Votes: 0

The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine. Votes: 0

I might enjoy being an albatross, being able to glide for days and daydream for hundreds of miles along the thermals. And then being able to hang like an affliction round some people's necks. Votes: 0

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 Votes: 0

My body was braille for the creeping influences. Votes: 0

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. Votes: 0

I am not a playwright. A playwright would take Antigone and hit it a few clouts and knock it out of shape and restructure it. My versioning was strictly verbal. Votes: 0

Anyone with gumption and a sharp mind will take the measure of two things: what's said and what's done. Votes: 0

The gift of writing is to be self-forgetful Votes: 0

The ability to start out upon your own impulse is fundamental to the gift of keeping going upon your own terms. . . . Getting started, keeping going, getting started again in art and in life, it seems to me this is the essential rhythm. Votes: 0

You had to come back to learn how to lose yourself, to be pilot and stray-witch, Hansel and Gretel in one. Votes: 0

It is always better to avenge dear ones than to indulge in mourning. For every one of us, living in this world means waiting for our end. Let whoever can win glory before death. When a warrior is gone, that will be his best and only bulwark. Votes: 0

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. Votes: 0

The aim of poetry and the poet is finally to be of service, to ply the effort of the individual into the larger work of the community as a whole. Votes: 0

Hope for a great sea-change timid to rebuke and too petty to forgive Votes: 0

I have begun to think of life as a series of ripples widening out from an original center. Votes: 0

All I know is a door into the dark Votes: 0

Believe that a further shore is reachable from here. Votes: 0

Poems that come swiftly are usually the ones that you keep. Votes: 0

I always had a superstitious fear of setting up a too well-designed writing place and then finding that the writing had absconded. Votes: 0

Sonnet is about movement in a form. Votes: 0

The murder of Sean Brown hurt my soul. Votes: 0

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. Votes: 0

To encounter 'Beowulf' is like taking a sledgehammer to a quarry face. You must bang in there. Votes: 0

Suspect too much sweet talk but never close your mind. Votes: 0

Memory has always been fundamental for me. In fact, remembering what I had forgotten is the way most of the poems get started. Votes: 0

My passport's green. Votes: 0

The bogholes might be Atlantic seepage. The wet centre is bottomless. Votes: 0

Yeats was 18th-century oratory, almost. Votes: 0

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. Votes: 0

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. Votes: 0

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. Votes: 0

I've always associated the moment of writing with a moment of lift, of joy, of unexpected reward. Votes: 0

At home in Ireland, there's a habit of avoidance, an ironical attitude towards the authority figure. Votes: 0

I'm a firm believer in learning by heart. Votes: 0

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. Votes: 0

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. Votes: 0

Anyone born and bred in Northern Ireland can't be too optimistic. Votes: 0

Even if the last move did not succeed, the inner command says move again. Votes: 0

Without needing to be theoretically instructed, consciousness quickly realizes that it is the site of variously contending discourses. Votes: 0

I suppose you could say my father's world was Thomas Hardy and my mother's D.H. Lawrence. Votes: 0

I have always thought of poems as stepping stones in one's own sense of oneself. Every now and again, you write a poem that gives you self-respect and steadies your going a little bit farther out in the stream. At the same time, you have to conjure the next stepping stone because the stream, we hope, keeps flowing. Votes: 0

The day I entered St Columb's College, my parents bought me a Conway Stewart pen. It was a special afternoon, of course. We were going to be parting that evening; they were aware of it, I was aware of it, nothing much was said about it. Votes: 0

The faking of feelings is a sin against the imagination. Votes: 0

I think of Dermot Healy as the heir to Patrick Kavanagh. Votes: 0

There's never going to be a united Ireland, you know. Votes: 0

There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you. Votes: 0

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. Votes: 0

Eternal life can mean utter reverence for life itself. Votes: 0

You can have Irish identity in the north and also have your Irish passport. Votes: 0

Anything Can Happen is also, incidentally, a poem that arose from teaching. I'd talked about the Horace Ode (I, 34) [on which the poem is based] in a lecture I gave at Harvard in the fall of 2000 entitled Bright Boltsand remembered it after the Twin Towers attack. Votes: 0

Anything Can Happen, on the other hand, is not only about the atrociousness of the September 11 attack, it is also a premonition of the deadly retaliation that was bound to come. Votes: 0

As writers and readers, as sinners and citizens, our realism and our aesthetic sense make us wary of crediting the positive note. Votes: 0

Behaviour that's admired is the path to power among people everywhere. Votes: 0

Believe that a further shore...is reachable from here. Votes: 0

Best to say that once a poem is finished I trust it to make its way, and I trust readers will find their way to it and through it, if the thing has got itself rightly expressed. Votes: 0

Between my finger and my thumb The squat pen rests; snug as a gun. ~from the poem "Digging Votes: 0

But even so, none of the news of these world-spasms entered me as terror. Votes: 0

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. Votes: 0

Desmond O'Grady is one of the senior figures in Irish Literary life, exemplary in the way he has committed himself over the decades to the vocation of poetry and has lived selflessly for the art Votes: 0

Don't be surprised if I demur, for, be advised my passport's green. Votes: 0

Even though Helen Vendler wasn't on the Harvard faculty when I came first in 1979, she was a guardian spirit; Robert Fitzgerald gave me the use of his study in Pusey Library. Monroe and Brenda Engel kept open house, Bob and Jana Kiely made me at home in Adams House. Then, too, in 1979, Frank Bidart, whom Id met in Dublin after the death of Robert Lowell he was over seeing Caroline Blackwood Frank brought me into his circle of friends, including Robert Pinsky and Alan Williamson. Votes: 0

Getting started, keeping going, getting started again - in art and in life, it seems to me this is the essential rhythm not only of achievement but of survival, the ground of convinced Votes: 0

Getting started, keeping going, getting started again - in art and in life, it seems to me this is the essential rhythm not only of achievement but of survival, the ground of convinced action, the basis of self-esteem and the guarantee of credibility in your lives, credibility to yourselves as well as to others. Votes: 0

God is a foreman with certain definite views Who orders life in shifts of work and leisure. Votes: 0

Harvard created wonderful conditions for me as a writerbut the writing was done, almost entirely, when I got home. Votes: 0

Harvard meant a lot in my writing life from the beginning, even though I didnt actually do much composition on the spot. Votes: 0

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 Votes: 0

Hope for a great sea-change timid to rebuke and too petty to forgive. Votes: 0

Hope is not optimism, which expects things to turn out well, but something rooted in the conviction that there is good worth working for. Votes: 0

I always believed that whatever had to be written would somehow get itself written. Votes: 0

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. Votes: 0

I don't miss teaching. I'm learning to take my time for myself. Votes: 0

I drink to keep body and soul apart. Votes: 0

I felt implicated in American affairs.Outraged at the blatant lies about Iraqs involvement in al Qaeda, at the regimes arrogance and stupidity, Guantnamo Bay and all the rest of it. But the poems at the start of District and Circle Anahorish 1944, The Aerodromearent particularly aimed as criticism. On the contrary, there's a recognition of the big contribution to world order made in Europe during World War II. Votes: 0

I have always thought of poems as stepping stones in one's own sense of oneself. Votes: 0

I rhyme" to see myself, to set the darkness echoing. Votes: 0

I shall gain glory or die. Votes: 0

I suppose I did feel a certain public pressure always. Votes: 0

I suppose I'm saying that defiance is actually part of the lyric job Votes: 0

If self is a location, so is love. Votes: 0

If self is a location, so is love: Bearings taken, markings, cardinal points, Options, obstinacies, dug heels, and distance, Here and there and now and then, a stance. Votes: 0

If you have the words, there's always a chance that you'll find the way. Votes: 0

Im a firm believer in learning by heart. Votes: 0

In off the moors, down through the mist beams, god-cursed Grendel came greedily loping. Votes: 0

Irish readers, British readers, American readers: is it odd that I haven't a clue about how differently they react? Or better say, I cannot find the words to describe my hunch about them. Votes: 0

It is difficult at times to repress the thought that history is about as instructive as an abattoir. Votes: 0

It is difficult at times to repress the thought that history is about as instructive as an abattoir; that Tacitus was right and that peace is merely the desolation left behind after the decisive operations of merciless power. Votes: 0

I've nothing against the Queen personally: I had lunch at the Palace once upon a time. Votes: 0

My teaching was animated by what I was reading and being excited by as a poet. Votes: 0

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. Votes: 0

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. Votes: 0

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. Votes: 0

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. Votes: 0

Once I was on the job, once I had got started, I felt safe enough, but the anticipation made me tense. Votes: 0

One of the very first poems I wrote was Docker That fist would drop a hammer on a Catholic and one of the sturdiest was Requiem for the Croppies, written 50 years after 1916 [the year of the Easter Rising]. Being responsible and what it means, what it demands, have indeed preoccupied me maybe too much. But this is it, this is the thing, this is what you're up against. Votes: 0

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. Votes: 0

Poetry is language in orbit. Votes: 0

Sink every impulse like a bolt. Secure The bastion of sensation. Do not waver Into language. Do not waver in it. Votes: 0

Smile As you find a rhythm Working you, slow mile by mile, Into your proper haunt. Votes: 0

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. Votes: 0

Strange, it is a huge nothing that we fear. Votes: 0

The appointment [in Harvard] gave me economic safety, writerly support, and intellectual self-respectplus eight months to myself every year. Votes: 0

The dotted line my father's ashplant made On Sandymount Strand Is something else the tide won't wash away. Votes: 0

The end of art is peace. Votes: 0

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. Votes: 0

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. Votes: 0

The next move is always the test. Votes: 0

The poems I did write there [in Harvard] include Alphabets the 1984 Phi Beta Kappa poem and A Sofa in the Forties. And, of course, the John Harvard poem for the 350th anniversary Villanelle for an Anniversary. Votes: 0

The thing about writing is that if you have the impulse, you will find the time. Votes: 0

The way we are living, timorous or bold, will have been our life. Votes: 0

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. Votes: 0

Two buckets were easier carried than one. / I grew up in between. Votes: 0

Walk on air against your better judgement. Votes: 0

When I was teaching, I gave a lot of my mind and anxiety to it. There was always something clenched and anxious in me until the classes were over. Votes: 0

Wherever that man went, he went gratefully. Votes: 0

Write whatever you like! Votes: 0

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. Votes: 0