All Seamus Heaney Quotes
- Strange, it is a huge nothing that we fear. Fear
- I've nothing against the Queen personally: I had lunch at the Palace once upon a time. Lunch
- The gift of writing is to be self-forgetful … to get a surge of inner life or inner supply or unexpected sense of empowerment, to… Afloat
- Wherever that man went, he went gratefully. Funny
- Two buckets were easier carried than one. / I grew up in between. Buckets
- The external reality and inner dynamic of happenings in Northern Ireland between 1968 and 1974 were symptomatic of change, violent change admittedly, but change nevertheless,… Admittedly
- I credit poetry for making this space-walk possible. Credit
- To begin with, I wanted that truth to life to possess a concrete reliability, and rejoiced most when the poem seemed most direct, an upfront… Begin
- Yet there are times when a deeper need enters, when we want the poem to be not only pleasurably right but compellingly wise, not only… Compellingly
- No bit of the natural world is more valuable or more vulnerable than the tree bit. Nothing is more like ourselves, standing upright, caught between… Beginning
- The gift of writing is to be self-forgetful Forgetful
- Hope is not optimism, which expects things to turn out well, but something rooted in the conviction that there is good worth working for. Conviction
- The thing about writing is that if you have the impulse, you will find the time. Find
- Believe that a further shore...is reachable from here. Believe
- I have always thought of poems as stepping stones in one's own sense of oneself. Every now and again, you write a poem that gives… Always Thought
- I might enjoy being an albatross, being able to glide for days and daydream for hundreds of miles along the thermals. And then being able… Able
- Poetry cannot afford to lose its fundamentally self-delighting inventiveness, its joy in being a process of language as well as a representation of things in… Afford
- My body was braille for the creeping influences. Body
- The way we are living, timorous or bold, will have been our life. Been
- Write whatever you like! Funny