The problem as you get older... is that you become more self-aware. At the same time, you have to surprise yourself. There's… — Seamus Heaney Copy Share Image
If self is a location, so is love: Bearings taken, markings, cardinal points, Options, obstinacies, dug heels, and distance, Here and there… — Seamus Heaney Copy Share Image
The completely solitary self: that's where poetry comes from, and it gets isolated by crisis, and those crises are often very intimate… — Seamus Heaney Copy Share Image
The appointment [in Harvard] gave me economic safety, writerly support, and intellectual self-respectplus eight months to myself every year. — Seamus Heaney Copy Share Image
Poetry cannot afford to lose its fundamentally self-delighting inventiveness, its joy in being a process of language as well as a representation… — Seamus Heaney Copy Share Image
The gift of writing is to be self-forgetful … to get a surge of inner life or inner supply or unexpected sense… — Seamus Heaney Copy Share Image
Getting started, keeping going, getting started again - in art and in life, it seems to me this is the essential rhythm… — Seamus Heaney Copy Share Image
Not to Learn Irish is to miss the opportunity of understanding what life in this country has meant and could mean in… — Seamus Heaney Copy Share Image
I have always thought of poems as stepping stones in one's own sense of oneself. Every now and again, you write a… — Seamus Heaney Copy Share Image
You had to come back to learn how to lose yourself, to be pilot and stray-witch, Hansel and Gretel in one. — Seamus Heaney Copy Share
If self is a location, so is love: Bearings taken, markings, cardinal points, Options, obstinacies, dug heels, and distance, Here and there and now… — Seamus Heaney Copy Share
I'm very conscious that people dear to me are alive in my imagination - poets in particular. — Seamus Heaney Copy Share
Once I was on the job, once I had got started, I felt safe enough, but the anticipation made me tense. — Seamus Heaney Copy Share
You can have Irish identity in the north and also have your Irish passport. — Seamus Heaney Copy Share
The external reality and inner dynamic of happenings in Northern Ireland between 1968 and 1974 were symptomatic of change, violent change admittedly, but change… — Seamus Heaney Copy Share
One of the very first poems I wrote was Docker That fist would drop a hammer on a Catholic and one of the sturdiest… — Seamus Heaney Copy Share
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… — Seamus Heaney Copy Share
Poetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to it. — Seamus Heaney Copy Share
Sink every impulse like a bolt. Secure The bastion of sensation. Do not waver Into language. Do not waver in it. — Seamus Heaney Copy Share
“It is said that once upon a time St. Kevin was kneeling with his arms stretched out in the form of a cross in… — Seamus Heaney Copy Share
![“The appointment [in Harvard] gave me economic safety, writerly support, and intellectual self-respectplus eight months to myself every year.” quote by Seamus Heaney](https://sms4smile.com/q/img-quotes/5d7/seamus-heaney-1711_appointments_the-appointment-in-harvard-gave-me-econo_2464825.jpg)
