• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

1. black
2. grey
3. blue
4. red
5. brown
6. white

The poet is on the side of undeceiving the world.

Seamus Heaney

Related Topics

PoetWorld

Popular Authors

Marilyn Monroe Paulo Coelho Abraham Lincoln C. S. Lewis Khalil Gibran Charlie Chaplin Gautama Buddha Isaac Newton

Prevoius| Next

More Seamus Heaney Quotes

• 

  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
  BigListeningMyselfSpeaker
• 

  I suppose you inevitably fall into habits of expression.

  SEAMUS HEANEY
  ExpressionFallHabitMyself
• 

  There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you.

  SEAMUS HEANEY
  RiskTruthWorldYourself
• 

  I’ve been in the habit of helping people.

  SEAMUS HEANEY
  HabitHelpMyselfPeople
• 

  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.

  SEAMUS HEANEY
  GroupNecessarySustainableWriting
• 

  Anyone born and bred in Northern Ireland can’t be too optimistic.

  SEAMUS HEANEY
  BornOptimistic
• 

  I’ve always associated the moment of writing with a moment of lift, of joy, of unexpected reward.

  SEAMUS HEANEY
  AssociationExpectationMomentsReward
• 

  I think childhood is, generally speaking, a preparation for disappointment.

  SEAMUS HEANEY
  ChildhoodDisappointmentPreparationThinking
• 

  Tom Sleigh’s poetry is hard-earned and well founded. I great admire the way it refuses to cut emotional corners and yet achieves a sense of lyric absolution.

  SEAMUS HEANEY
  AbsoluteAdmireGreatnessLyricsPoetry
• 

  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
  DimensionGodLanguagePersonalPromiseRealityYearning
• 

  We go to poetry, we go to literature in general, to be forwarded within ourselves.

  SEAMUS HEANEY
  LiteratureOurselvesPoetry
• 

  Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.

  SEAMUS HEANEY
  HopeMaintainStartYourself
• 

  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 be afloat, to be out of yourself.

  SEAMUS HEANEY
  EmpowermentExpectationForgetGiftWritingYourself
• 

  It’s difficult to learn poems off by heart that don’t rhyme.

  SEAMUS HEANEY
  DifficultHeartLearningRhyme
• 

  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
  ExpectationNobelOrdinaryPrize
• 

  I suppose you could say my father’s world was Thomas Hardy and my mother’s D.H. Lawrence.

  SEAMUS HEANEY
  FatherMyselfWorld