Ireland Quotes by Seamus Heaney

The external reality and inner dynamic of happenings in Northern Ireland between 1968 and 1974 were symptomatic of change, violent change admittedly,…

— Seamus Heaney

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

— Seamus Heaney

I don't do as many readings as I used to. There was a time when I was on the road a lot…

— Seamus Heaney

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

— Seamus Heaney

I think of the bog as a feminine goddess-ridden ground, rather like the territory of Ireland itself.

— Seamus Heaney

I would say that something important for me and for my generation in Northern Ireland was the 1947 Education Act, which allowed…

— Seamus Heaney

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

— Seamus Heaney

Loyalism, or Unionism, or Protestantism, or whatever you want to call it, in Northern Ireland - it operates not as a class…

— Seamus Heaney

My point is there's a hidden Scotland in anyone who speaks the Northern Ireland speech. It's a terrific complicating factor, not just…

— Seamus Heaney

My father was a creature of the archaic world, really. He would have been entirely at home in a Gaelic hill-fort. His…

— Seamus Heaney

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

— Seamus Heaney

A person from Northern Ireland is naturally cautious.

— Seamus Heaney

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

— Seamus Heaney

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

— Seamus Heaney