Poetry is more a threshold than a path.
SEAMUS HEANEYThe 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.
More Seamus Heaney Quotes
-
-
Manifesting that order of poetry where we can at last grow up to that which we stored up as we grew.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
Poetry is a domestic art, most itself when most at home.
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 -
I’ve been in the habit of helping people.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
Your temperament is what you write with, but it’s also how you deal with the world.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
The kind of poet who founds and reconstitutes values is somebody like Yeats or Whitman – these are public value-founders.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
In Northern Ireland, helicopters are not usually used to promote poetry.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
Even if the last move did not succeed, the inner command says move again.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
The Heaneys were aristocrats, in the sense that they took for granted a code of behavior that was given and unspoken. Argumentation, persuasion, speech itself, for God’s sake, just seemed otiose and superfluous to them.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
If poetry and the arts do anything, they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
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.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
Then as the years went on and my listening became more deliberate, I would climb up on an arm of our big sofa to get my ear closer to the wireless speaker.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
A person from Northern Ireland is naturally cautious.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
I’m very conscious that people dear to me are alive in my imagination – poets in particular.
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 -
Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
There’s never going to be a united Ireland, you know.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
It is very true to say that work done by writers is quite often an attempt to give solid expression to that which is bothering them. They feel they have got it right if they express the stress.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
Poetry is what we do to break bread with the dead.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
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 culture at the bottom of a jar, although it doesn’t grow, I think, or help anything else to grow unless you find a way to reach it and touch it.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
Eternal life can mean utter reverence for life itself.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
Dylan Thomas is now as much a case history as a chapter in the history of poetry.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
Memory has always been fundamental for me. In fact, remembering what I had forgotten is the way most of the poems get started.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
In a way, Anglo-Saxon poetry cannot be translated.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
My father and mother had no sense of entitlement for their children.
SEAMUS HEANEY