black
grey
blue
red
brown
white

The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.

Seamus Heaney

What I’ve said before, only half in joke, is that everybody in Ireland is famous. Or, maybe better, say everybody is familiar.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Better Famous Myself Talk
Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Hope Maintain Start Yourself
As a young poet, you need corroboration, and that’s what publication does.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Need Poet Public Young Yourself
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

Brutal Change Citizenship Destruction Perception Possible Pursue Recognition
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.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Award Judgement Panel Poetry Solidarity Yourself
History says, ‘Don’t hope on this side of the grave.’
SEAMUS HEANEY

Grave History Hope Side
The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Help Imagination Myself
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

Argument Aristocrats Behavior God Talk
Your temperament is what you write with, but it’s also how you deal with the world.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Deal Temperature World Writing
I would say that something important for me and for my generation in Northern Ireland was the 1947 Education Act, which allowed students who won scholarships to go on to secondary schools and thence to university.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Generation Important Myself University Win
The faking of feelings is a sin against the imagination.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Deep Fake Feeling Imagination Sin
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

Home Myself Reading Time
The poet is on the side of undeceiving the world.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Poet World
My father was a creature of the archaic world, really. He would have been entirely at home in a Gaelic hill-fort. His side of the family, and the houses I associate with his side of the family, belonged to a traditional rural Ireland.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Associate Creature Family Father Traditional World
In 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.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Family Farm Funeral Kind Representation Work
I’m a firm believer in learning by heart.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Believe Heart Learning

The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

More Seamus Heaney Quotes