21 Seamus Heaney Quotes

Seamus Heaney quotes

1. I rhyme To see myself, to set the darkness echoing.

2. The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge Through living roots awaken in my head. But I've no spade to follow men like them. Between my finger and my thumb The squat pen rests. I'll dig with it.

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

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

5. 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.

6. 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.

7. For ett forfattarskap av lyrisk skonhet och etiskt djup, som lyfter fram vardagens mirakler och det levande forflutna.

1. Im a firm believer in learning by heart.

2. I'm a firm believer in learning by heart.

3. Eternal life can mean utter reverence for life itself.

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

5. I'm very conscious that people dear to me are alive in my imagination - poets in particular.

6. You can have Irish identity in the north and also have your Irish passport.

7. 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.

8. 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.

9. 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.

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

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

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

13. My father and mother had no sense of entitlement for their children.

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