I can't think of a case where poems changed the world, but what they do is they change people's understanding of what's… — Seamus Heaney Copy Share Image
Your temperament is what you write with, but it's also how you deal with the world. — 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
But even so, none of the news of these world-spasms entered me as terror. — Seamus Heaney Copy Share Image
It is always better to avenge dear ones than to indulge in mourning. For every one of us, living in this world… — Seamus Heaney Copy Share Image
No bit of the natural world is more valuable or more vulnerable than the tree bit. Nothing is more like ourselves, standing… — 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
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
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 felt implicated in American affairs.Outraged at the blatant lies about Iraqs involvement in al Qaeda, at the regimes arrogance and stupidity,… — Seamus Heaney Copy Share Image
On the contrary, a trust in the staying power and travel-worthiness of such good should encourage us to credit the possibility of… — 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
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
