The end of art is peace.
SEAMUS HEANEYEvery time you read a poem aloud to yourself in the presence of others, you are reading it into yourself and them. Voice helps to carry words farther and deeper than the eye.
More Seamus Heaney Quotes
-
-
When I first encountered the name of the city of Stockholm, I little thought that I would ever visit it, never mind end up being welcomed to it as a guest of the Swedish Academy and the Nobel Foundation.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
The murder of Sean Brown hurt my soul.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
In the United States, in poetry workshops, it’s now quite a thing to make graduate students learn poems by heart.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
The poet is on the side of undeceiving the world.
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 -
Poetry is a domestic art, most itself when most at home.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
If you go into an underground train in London – probably anywhere, but chiefly in London – there’s that sense of almost entering a ghostly dimension. People are very still and quiet; they don’t exchange many pleasantries.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
You yourself don’t have to be shaken by mortal danger in order to feel your mortality.
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 -
I think childhood is, generally speaking, a preparation for disappointment.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
I suppose you could say my father’s world was Thomas Hardy and my mother’s D.H. Lawrence.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
There’s never going to be a united Ireland, you know.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
Without needing to be theoretically instructed, consciousness quickly realizes that it is the site of variously contending discourses.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
My father and mother had no sense of entitlement for their children.
SEAMUS HEANEY