The Best Seamus Heaney quotes

Dylan Thomas is now as much a case history as a chapter in the history of poetry. — Seamus Heaney

We go to poetry, we go to literature in general, to be forwarded within ourselves. — Seamus Heaney

In a way, Anglo–Saxon poetry cannot be translated. — Seamus Heaney

The completely solitary self: that’s where poetry comes from, and it gets isolated by crisis, and those crises are often very intimate also. — Seamus Heaney

Poetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to it. — Seamus Heaney

Poetry is more a threshold than a path. — Seamus Heaney

Poetry is language in orbit. — Seamus Heaney

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

Manifesting that order of poetry where we can at last grow up to that which we stored up as we grew. — Seamus Heaney

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

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

I credit poetry for making this space–walk possible. — Seamus Heaney

The gift of writing is to be self–forgetful… — Seamus Heaney

The thing about writing is that if you have the impulse, you will find the time. — Seamus Heaney

I’ve always associated the moment of writing with a moment of lift, of joy, of unexpected reward. — Seamus Heaney

Harvard created wonderful conditions for me as a writerbut the writing was done, almost entirely, when I got home. — Seamus Heaney

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. — Seamus Heaney

Harvard meant a lot in my writing life from the beginning, even though I didnt actually do much composition on the spot. — Seamus Heaney

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

It’s difficult to learn poems off by heart that don’t rhyme. — Seamus Heaney

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. — Seamus Heaney

The most exhilarating for the writer and the reader, are gift–things–poems which arrive on their own energy, poems that in William Shakespeare’s term ‘slip’ from you. — Seamus Heaney

In the United States, in poetry workshops, it’s now quite a thing to make graduate students learn poems by heart. — Seamus Heaney

Between my finger and my thumb The squat pen rests; snug as a gun. ~from the poem ‘Digging — Seamus Heaney

More than loud acclaim, I love Books, silence, thought, my alcove. Pangur Bán Poem by Anon Irish Monk, Translated by Seamus Heaney — Seamus Heaney

Since when,’ he asked, ‘Are the first line and last line of any poem Where the poem begins and ends? — Seamus Heaney

I rhyme To see myself, to set the darkness echoing. — Seamus Heaney

Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained. — Seamus Heaney

That was their way, their heathenish hope; deep in their hearts they remembered hell. — Seamus Heaney

History says, ‘Don’t hope on this side of the grave.’ — Seamus Heaney

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

Hope for a great sea–change timid to rebuke and too petty to forgive. — Seamus Heaney

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. — Seamus Heaney

Once I was on the job, once I had got started, I felt safe enough, but the anticipation made me tense. — Seamus Heaney

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

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. — Seamus Heaney

If poetry and the arts do anything, they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness. — Seamus Heaney

How perilous is it to choose not to love the life we’re shown? — Seamus Heaney

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. — Seamus Heaney

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. — Seamus Heaney

I have begun to think of life as a series of ripples widening out from an original center. — Seamus Heaney

And a young prince must be prudent like that, giving freely while his father lives so that afterwards, in age when fighting starts steadfast companions will stand by him and hold the line. — Seamus Heaney

I’ve nothing against the Queen personally. I had lunch at the Palace once upon a time. — Seamus Heaney

I suppose you could say my father’s world was Thomas Hardy and my mother’s D.H. Lawrence. — Seamus Heaney

There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you. — Seamus Heaney

For every one of us, living in this world means waiting for our end. — Seamus Heaney

But even so, none of the news of these world–spasms entered me as terror. — 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

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

I have always thought of poems as stepping stones in one’s own sense of oneself. — Seamus Heaney

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. — Seamus Heaney

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. — Seamus Heaney