I suppose you could say my father’s world was Thomas Hardy and my mother’s D.H. Lawrence.
SEAMUS HEANEYThe fact of the matter is that the most unexpected and miraculous thing in my life was the arrival in it of poetry itself – as a vocation and an elevation almost.
More Seamus Heaney Quotes
-
-
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.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
The murder of Sean Brown hurt my soul.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
One doesn’t want one’s identity coerced.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
I have begun to think of life as a series of ripples widening out from an original center.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
My language and my sensibility are yearning to admit a kind of religious or transcendent dimension. But then there’s the reality: there’s no Heaven, no afterlife of the sort we were promised, and no personal God.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
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.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
It’s difficult to learn poems off by heart that don’t rhyme.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
As writers and readers, as sinners and citizens, our realism and our aesthetic sense make us wary of crediting the positive note.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
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.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
In a way, Anglo-Saxon poetry cannot be translated.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
The kinds of truth that art gives us many, many times are small truths. They don’t have the resonance of an encyclical from the Pope stating an eternal truth, but they partake of the quality of eternity. There is a sort of timeless delight in them.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
Since I was a schoolboy, I’ve been used to being recognized on the road by old and young, and being bantered with and, indeed, being taunted.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
The poet is on the side of undeceiving the world.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
You yourself don’t have to be shaken by mortal danger in order to feel your mortality.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
In Northern Ireland, helicopters are not usually used to promote poetry.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
I always believed that whatever had to be written would somehow get itself written.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
I’ve said it before about the Nobel Prize: it’s like being struck by a more or less benign avalanche. It was unexpected, unlooked for, and extraordinary.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
In poetry, everything can be faked but the intensity of utterance.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
Sonnet is about movement in a form.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
I think that water is immediately interesting. It’s just, as an element, it is full of life. It is associated with origin; it is bright – it reflects you.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
The completely solitary self: that’s where poetry comes from, and it gets isolated by crisis, and those crises are often very intimate also.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
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.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
Poetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to it.
SEAMUS HEANEY