Alive Quote by Seamus Heaney

You had to come back to learn how to lose yourself, to be pilot and stray-witch, Hansel and Gretel in one.

— Seamus Heaney

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

Once I was on the job, once I had got started, I felt safe enough, but the anticipation made me tense.

— Seamus Heaney

You can have Irish identity in the north and also have your Irish passport.

— Seamus Heaney

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

Hope for a great sea-change timid to rebuke and too petty to forgive

— Seamus Heaney

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

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

Poetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to it.

— Seamus Heaney

Sink every impulse like a bolt. Secure The bastion of sensation. Do not waver Into language. Do not waver in it.

— Seamus Heaney

Two buckets were easier carried than one. / I grew up in between.

— Seamus Heaney

I suppose I'm saying that defiance is actually part of the lyric job

— Seamus Heaney