My father and mother had no sense of entitlement for their children. — Seamus Heaney Copy Share Image
“Human beings suffer, They torture one another, They get hurt and get hard. No poem or play or song Can fully right… — Seamus Heaney Copy Share Image
The day I entered St Columb's College, my parents bought me a Conway Stewart pen. It was a special afternoon, of course.… — Seamus Heaney Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
“And a young prince must be prudent like that, giving freely while his father lives so that afterwards, in age when fighting… — Seamus Heaney Copy Share Image
“Meanwhile, the sword began to wilt into gory icicles, to slather and thaw. It was a wonderful thing, the way it all… — Seamus Heaney Copy Share Image
I suppose you could say my father's world was Thomas Hardy and my mother's D.H. Lawrence. — 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
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
