You can have Irish identity in the north and also have your Irish passport. — 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
The amount of sensory material stored up or stored down in the brain's and the body's systems is inestimable. It's like a… — 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
The experiment of poetry, as far as I am concerned, happens when the poem carries you beyond where you could have reasonably… — Seamus Heaney Copy Share Image
I'm not personally obsessed with death. At a certain age, the light that you live in is inhabited by the shades -… — Seamus Heaney Copy Share Image
If you go into an underground train in London - probably anywhere, but chiefly in London - there's that sense of almost… — Seamus Heaney Copy Share Image
As a young poet, you need corroboration, and that's what publication does. — Seamus Heaney Copy Share Image
To encounter 'Beowulf' is like taking a sledgehammer to a quarry face. You must bang in there. — 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 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
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 yourself don't have to be shaken by mortal danger in order to feel your mortality. — 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
