God is a foreman with certain definite views Who orders life in shifts of work and leisure. — 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
If poetry and the arts do anything, they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness. — Seamus Heaney Copy Share Image
I think that water is immediately interesting. It's just, as an element, it is full of life. It is associated with origin;… — Seamus Heaney Copy Share Image
Desmond O'Grady is one of the senior figures in Irish Literary life, exemplary in the way he has committed himself over the… — 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
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
The fact of the matter is that the most unexpected and miraculous thing in my life was the arrival in it of… — Seamus Heaney Copy Share Image
To begin with, I wanted that truth to life to possess a concrete reliability, and rejoiced most when the poem seemed most… — Seamus Heaney Copy Share Image
“I want away to the house of death, to my father under the low, clay roof.” — Seamus Heaney Copy Share Image
“Is there life before death? That’s chalked up In Ballymurphy. Competence with pain, Coherent miseries, a bite and a sup, We hug… — Seamus Heaney Copy Share Image
Harvard meant a lot in my writing life from the beginning, even though I didnt actually do much composition on the spot. — Seamus Heaney Copy Share Image
I have begun to think of life as a series of ripples widening out from an original center. — 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 Image
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 Image
I'm very conscious that people dear to me are alive in my imagination - poets in particular. — Seamus Heaney Copy Share Image
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 Image
You can have Irish identity in the north and also have your Irish passport. — Seamus Heaney Copy Share Image
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 Image
Hope for a great sea-change timid to rebuke and too petty to forgive — Seamus Heaney Copy Share Image
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 Image
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 Image
Poetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to it. — Seamus Heaney Copy Share Image
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 Image
