Seamus Heaney Quotes & Sayings

Wherever that man went, he went gratefully. — Seamus Heaney

If self is a location, so is love:
Bearings taken, markings, cardinal points,
Options, obstinacies, dug heels, and distance,
Here and there and now and then, a stance. — Seamus Heaney

And you, Tacitus,
observe how I make my grove
on an old crannog
piled by the fearful dead:

a desolate peace.
Our mother ground
in sour with the blood
of her faithful,

they lie gargling
in her sacred heart
as the legions stare
from the ramparts.

Come back to this
'island of the ocean'
where nothing will suffice.
Read the inhumed faces

of casualty and victim;
report us fairly,
how we slaughter
for the common good

and shave the heads
of the notorious,
how the goddess swallows
our love and terror.
- Kinship — 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

Dylan Thomas is now as much a case history as a chapter in the history of poetry. — Seamus Heaney

I want away to the house of death, to my father under the low, clay roof. — Seamus Heaney

By God, the old man could handle a spade.
Just like his old man. — Seamus Heaney

Desmond O'Grady is one of the senior figures in Irish
Literary life, exemplary in the way he has committed
himself over the decades to the vocation of poetry and
has lived selflessly for the art — Seamus Heaney

If self is a location, so is love. — Seamus Heaney

A ring-whorled prow rode in the harbour,
ice-clad, outbound, a craft for a prince.
They stretched their beloved lord in his boat,
laid out by the mast, amidships,
the great ring-giver. Far fetched treasures
were piled upon him, and precious gear.
I have never heard before of a ship so well furbished
with battle tackle, bladed weapons
and coats of mail. The massed treasure
was loaded on top of him: it would travel far
on out into the ocean's sway.
They decked his body no less bountifully
with offerings than those first ones did
who cast him away when he was a child
and launched him alone over the waves.
And they set a gold standard up
high above his head and let him drift
to wind and tide, bewailing him
and mourning their loss. No man can tell,
no wise man in hall or weathered veteran
knows for certain who salvaged that load. — Seamus Heaney

I composed habits for those acres
so that my last look would be
neither gluttonous nor starved.
I was ready to go anywhere. — 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

The faking of feelings is a sin against the imagination. — Seamus Heaney

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

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

Suspect too much sweet talk but never close your mind. — Seamus Heaney

I might enjoy being an albatross, being able to glide for days and daydream for hundreds of miles along the thermals. And then being able to hang like an affliction round some people's necks. — Seamus Heaney

I have always thought of poems as stepping stones in one's own sense of oneself. Every now and again, you write a poem that gives you self-respect and steadies your going a little bit farther out in the stream. At the same time, you have to conjure the next stepping stone because the stream, we hope, keeps flowing. — Seamus Heaney

You carried your own burden and very soon your symptoms of creeping privilege disappeared. — Seamus Heaney

I spend almost every morning with mail. — Seamus Heaney

I've nothing against the Queen personally. I had lunch at the Palace once upon a time. — Seamus Heaney

It is said that once upon a time St. Kevin was kneeling with his arms stretched out in the form of a cross in Glendalough ... As Kevin knelt and prayed, a blackbird mistook his outstretched hand for some kind of roost and swooped down upon it, laid a clutch of eggs in it and proceeded to nest in it as if it were the branch of a tree. Then, overcome with pity and constrained by his faith to love all creatures great and small, Kevin stayed immobile for hours and days and nights and weeks, holding out his hand until the eggs hatched and the fledging grew wings, true to life if subversive of common sense, at the intersection of natural process and the glimpsed ideal, at one and the same time a signpost and a reminder. Manifesting that order of poetry where we can at last grow up to that which we stored up as we grew. — Seamus Heaney

The ability to start out upon your own impulse is
fundamental to the gift of keeping going upon your own
terms ... Getting started, keeping going, getting started
again in art and in life, it seems to me this is the essential rhythm. — Seamus Heaney

Eternal life can mean utter reverence for life itself. — Seamus Heaney

Was music once a proof of God's existence? As long as it admits things beyond measure, That supposition stands. — Seamus Heaney

Did you ever hear tell,'
said Jimmy Farrell,
'of the skulls they have
in the city of Dublin?
White skulls and black skulls
and yellow skulls, and some
with full teeth, and some
haven't only but one,'
and compounded history
in the pan of 'an old Dane,
maybe, was drowned
in the Flood.'
My words lick around
cobbled quays, go hunting
lightly as pampooties
over the skull-capped ground.
-Viking Dublin: Trial Pieces — Seamus Heaney

A four foot box, a foot for every year. — Seamus Heaney

This morning from a dewy motorway
I saw the new camp for the internees:
A bomb had left a crater of fresh clay
In the roadside, and over in the trees
Machine-gun posts defined a real stockade.
There was that white mist you get on a low ground
And it was deja-vu, some film made
Of Stalag 17, a bad dream with no sound.
Is there a life before death? That's chalked up
In Ballymurphy. Competence with pain,
Coherent miseries, a bite and sup:
we hug our little destiny again.
-Whatever You Say Say Nothing — Seamus Heaney

Anyone born and bred in Northern Ireland can't be too optimistic. — Seamus Heaney

Then I thought of the tribe whose dances never fail / For they keep dancing till they sight the deer. — Seamus Heaney

Your temperament is what you write with, but it's also how you deal with the world. — Seamus Heaney

A person from Northern Ireland is naturally cautious. — Seamus Heaney

In a way, Anglo-Saxon poetry cannot be translated. — Seamus Heaney

Don't be surprised if I demur, for, be advised my passport's green. — Seamus Heaney

Hope is not optimism, which expects things to turn out well, but something rooted in the conviction that there is good worth working for. — Seamus Heaney

The dotted line my father's ashplant made On Sandymount Strand Is something else the tide won't wash away. — Seamus Heaney

How perilous is it to choose not to love the life we're shown? — Seamus Heaney

We want what the woman wanted in the prison queue in Leningrad, standing there with cold and whispering for fear, enduring the terror of Stalin's regime and asking the poet Anna Akhmatova if she could describe it all, if her art was equal to it. — Seamus Heaney

But even so, none of the news of these world-spasms entered me as terror. — Seamus Heaney

The experimental poetry thing is not my thing. It's a programme of the avant-garde: basically a refusal of the kind of poetry I write. — Seamus Heaney

Only the very stupid or the very deprived can any longer help knowing that the documents of civilization have been written in blood and tears, blood and tears no less real for being very remote. — Seamus Heaney

My poor scapegoat,
I almost love you
but would have cast, I know,
the stones of silence.
I am the artful voyeur
of your brain's exposed
and darkened combs,
your muscles' webbing
and all your numbered bones:
I who have stood dumb
when your betraying sisters,
cauled in tar,
wept by the railings,
who would connive
in civilized outrage
yet understand the exact
and tribal, intimate revenge.
-Punishment — Seamus Heaney

In poetry, everything can be faked but the intensity of utterance. — Seamus Heaney

I always believed that whatever had to be written would somehow get itself written. — Seamus Heaney

And here is love
like a tinsmith's scoop
sunk past its glean
in the meal-bin
Sunlight — Seamus Heaney

If poetry and the arts do anything, they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness. — Seamus Heaney

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun. — Seamus Heaney

Poetry is what we do to break bread with the dead. — 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

Yet there are times when a deeper need enters, when we want the poem to be not only pleasurably right but compellingly wise, not only a surprising variation played upon the world, but a re-tuning of the world itself. — Seamus Heaney

At a certain age, the light that you live in is inhabited by the shades ... I'm very conscious that people dear to me are alive in my imagination ... These people are with me. It's just a stage of your life when the death of people doesn't banish them out of your consciousness, They're part of the light in your head. — Seamus Heaney

Let whoever can win glory before death. — Seamus Heaney

Strange, it is a huge nothing that we fear. — Seamus Heaney

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

Poetry cannot afford to lose its fundamentally self-delighting inventiveness, its joy in being a process of language as well as a representation of things in 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

It is always better
to avenge dear ones than to indulge in mourning.
For every one of us, living in this world
means waiting for our end. Let whoever can
win glory before death. When a warrior is gone,
that will be his best and only bulwark. — Seamus Heaney

I've been in the habit of helping people. — Seamus Heaney

The bogholes might be Atlantic seepage.
The wet centre is bottomless. — Seamus Heaney

I believe we are put here to improve civilisation. — Seamus Heaney

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

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

The end of art is peace. — Seamus Heaney

For now that it was gone, it all seemed Far stranger: more fantastical than Pharaoh. And he was changed: a foreigner among them. — Seamus Heaney

Believe that further shore
Is reachable from here.
Believe in miracle
And cures and healing wells. — Seamus Heaney

If you have the words, there's always a chance that you'll find the way. — Seamus Heaney

I'm not personally obsessed with death. At a certain age, the light that you live in is inhabited by the shades - it 'tis. — Seamus Heaney

The problem as you get older ... is that you become more self-aware. At the same time, you have to surprise yourself. There's no way of arranging the surprise, so it is tricky. — Seamus Heaney

Since when," he asked,
"Are the first line and last line of any poem
Where the poem begins and ends? — Seamus Heaney

I always had a superstitious fear of setting up a too well-designed writing place and then finding that the writing had absconded. — Seamus Heaney

I suppose I'm saying that defiance is actually part of the lyric job — Seamus Heaney

We were small and thought we knew nothing Worth knowing. We thought words travelled the wires In the shiny pouches of raindrops, Each one seeded full with the light Of the sky, the gleam of the lines, and ourselves So infinitesimally scaled We could stream through the eye of a needle. — Seamus Heaney

My experience is that prose usually equals duty - last minute, overdue-deadline stuff or a panic lecture to be written. — Seamus Heaney

I suppose you inevitably fall into habits of expression. — Seamus Heaney

Love brought me that far by the hand, without The slightest doubt or irony, dry-eyed And knowledgeable, contrary as be damned; Then just kept standing there, not letting go. — Seamus Heaney

The 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. — Seamus Heaney

So whether he calls it spirit music or not, I don't care. He took it out of wind off mid-Atlantic. — Seamus Heaney

Fate goes ever as fate must. — Seamus Heaney

The aim of poetry and the poet is finally to be of service, to ply the effort of the individual into the larger work of the community as a whole. — Seamus Heaney

Poetry is more a threshold than a path. — 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

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

Every 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. — Seamus Heaney

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

You can have Irish identity in the north and also have your Irish passport. — Seamus Heaney

Which would be better, what sticks or what falls through? Or does the choice itself create the value? — Seamus Heaney

I'm very conscious that people dear to me are alive in my imagination - poets in particular. — Seamus Heaney

Anybody serious about poetry knows how hard it is to achieve anything worthwhile in it. — Seamus Heaney

Not to Learn Irish is to miss the opportunity of understanding what life in this country has meant and could mean in a better future. It is to cut oneself off from ways of being at home. If we regard self-understanding, mutual understanding, imaginative enhancement, cultural diversity and a tolerant political atmosphereas a desirable attainments, we should remember that a knowledge of the Irish language is an essential element in their realisation. — Seamus Heaney

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

Even if the last move did not succeed, the inner command says move again. — Seamus Heaney

I credit poetry for making this space-walk possible. — Seamus Heaney

One doesn't want one's identity coerced. — Seamus Heaney

He sits, strong and blunt as a Celtic cross,
Clearly used to silence and an armchair:
Tonight the wife and children will be quiet
At slammed door and smoker's cough in the hall. — Seamus Heaney

In Northern Ireland, helicopters are not usually used to promote poetry. — Seamus Heaney

One of the best descriptions of the type of writer I am was given by Tom Paulin, who described himself as a 'binge' writer - like a binge drinker. I go on binges. — Seamus Heaney

Postscript

And some time make the time to drive out west
Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore,
In September or October, when the wind
And the light are working off each other
So that the ocean on one side is wild
With foam and glitter, and inland among stones
The surface of a slate-grey lake is lit
By the earthed lightning of a flock of swans,
Their feathers roughed and ruffling, white on white,
Their fully grown headstrong-looking heads
Tucked or cresting or busy underwater.
Useless to think you'll park and capture it
More thoroughly. You are neither here nor there,
A hurry through which known and strange things pass
As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways
And catch the heart off guard and blow it open. — Seamus Heaney

The way we are living, timorous or bold, will have been our life. — Seamus Heaney

I can't think of a case where poems changed the world, but what they do is they change people's understanding of what's going on in the world. — 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