The thing about writing is that if you have the impulse, you will find the time. — Seamus Heaney Copy Share Image
I've always associated the moment of writing with a moment of lift, of joy, of unexpected reward. — Seamus Heaney Copy Share Image
I've nothing against the Queen personally: I had lunch at the Palace once upon a time. — Seamus Heaney Copy Share Image
It is difficult at times to repress the thought that history is about as instructive as an abattoir. — Seamus Heaney Copy Share Image
It is difficult at times to repress the thought that history is about as instructive as an abattoir; that Tacitus was right… — Seamus Heaney Copy Share Image
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
Yet there are times when a deeper need enters, when we want the poem to be not only pleasurably right but compellingly… — Seamus Heaney Copy Share Image
I feel myself part of something. Not only being part of a community but part of an actual moment and a movement… — Seamus Heaney Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
Every time you read a poem aloud to yourself in the presence of others, you are reading it into yourself and them.… — Seamus Heaney Copy Share Image
The kinds of truth that art gives us many, many times are small truths. They don't have the resonance of an encyclical… — 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
“It is said that once upon a time St. Kevin was kneeling with his arms stretched out in the form of a… — Seamus Heaney Copy Share Image
“Postscript And some time make the time to drive out west Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore, In September or October,… — Seamus Heaney Copy Share Image
Debate doesn’t really change things. It gets you bogged in deeper. If you can address or reopen the subject with something new,… — Seamus Heaney Copy Share Image
Now it’s high watermark and floodtide in the heart and time to go. The sea-nymphs in the spray will be the chorus… — 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 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
![“One of the very first poems I wrote was Docker That fist would drop a hammer on a Catholic and one of the sturdiest was Requiem for the Croppies, written 50 years after 1916 [the year of the Easter Rising]. Being responsible and what it means, what it demands, have indeed preoccupied me maybe too…” quote by Seamus Heaney](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/5fb/seamus-heaney-1711_being-responsible_one-of-the-very-first-poems-i-wrote-was_181491.jpg)
![“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 is based] in a lecture I gave at Harvard in the fall of 2000 entitled Bright Boltsand remembered it after the Twin Towers attack.” quote by Seamus Heaney](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/2e6/seamus-heaney-1711_anything-can-happen_anything-can-happen-is-also-incidentally_181651.jpg)
