Memory has always been fundamental for me. In fact, remembering what I had forgotten is the way most of the poems get started.
SEAMUS HEANEYIn my early teens, I acquired a kind of representative status: went on behalf of the family to wakes and funerals and so on. And I would be counted on as an adult contributor when it came to farm work – the hay in the summertime, for example.
More Seamus Heaney Quotes
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Sonnet is about movement in a form.
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I feel myself part of something. Not only being part of a community but part of an actual moment and a movement of Irish writing and art. That sense of being part of the whole thing is the deepest joy.
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The murder of Sean Brown hurt my soul.
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One doesn’t want one’s identity coerced.
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Write whatever you like!
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I’m very conscious that people dear to me are alive in my imagination – poets in particular.
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The experiment of poetry, as far as I am concerned, happens when the poem carries you beyond where you could have reasonably expected to go.
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In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself.
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I have begun to think of life as a series of ripples widening out from an original center.
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The completely solitary self: that’s where poetry comes from, and it gets isolated by crisis, and those crises are often very intimate also.
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Nowadays, what an award gives is a sense of solidarity with the poetry guild, as it were: sustenance coming from the assent of your peers on the judging panel.
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Poetry is more a threshold than a path.
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I’ve been in the habit of helping people.
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The end of art is peace.
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The faking of feelings is a sin against the imagination.
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I don’t do as many readings as I used to. There was a time when I was on the road a lot more, at home in Ireland, in Britain, in Canada and the States, a time when I had more stamina and appetite for it.
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Whether it be a matter of personal relations within a marriage or political initiatives within a peace process, there is no sure-fire do-it-yourself kit.
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I think of the bog as a feminine goddess-ridden ground, rather like the territory of Ireland itself.
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I suppose you could say my father’s world was Thomas Hardy and my mother’s D.H. Lawrence.
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A person from Northern Ireland is naturally cautious.
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The group of writers I had grown up with in the ’60s – Derek Mahon, Michael Longley, James Simmons, John Hewitt, Paul Muldoon – formed a very necessary and self-sustaining group.
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My experience is that prose usually equals duty – last minute, overdue-deadline stuff or a panic lecture to be written.
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In poetry, everything can be faked but the intensity of utterance.
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But that citizen’s perception was also at one with the truth in recognizing that the very brutality of the means by which the IRA were pursuing change was destructive of the trust upon which new possibilities would have to be based.
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I’m not personally obsessed with death. At a certain age, the light that you live in is inhabited by the shades – it ’tis.
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In a way, Anglo-Saxon poetry cannot be translated.
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