Quotes & Sayings About Heaney

The problem with being, as I was then, and on some days continue to be, neither adventurous nor reclusive is that you want friends, but you don't want them to do anything you wouldn't do. But you wouldn't do anything. — Katie Heaney

My point is there's a hidden Scotland in anyone who speaks the Northern Ireland speech. It's a terrific complicating factor, not just in Northern Ireland, but Ireland generally. — 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

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

You yourself don't have to be shaken by mortal danger in order to feel your mortality. — Seamus Heaney

If there were one sentence that explained everything you feel right now, what would it be?" I thought about it for a second. "I fucking hope that everyone dies. — Katie Heaney

And a young prince must be prudent like that,
giving freely while his father lives
so that afterwards, in age when fighting starts
steadfast companions will stand by him
and hold the line. — 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

Apparently she didn't know about that abomination of the senses in which cute boys can hear you speak their names from literally any distance in space and/or time. — Katie Heaney

Innumerable soldiers have told me they don't want to be thanked for their service and they don't want to be seen as heroes (or, for that matter, villains). They want to be respected for the job they did and the pride they took in doing it well. — Elizabeth Heaney

And though nobody has been dumb enough to say anything close to "You need to get laid" to my face, I resent the idea that anyone might think, if they knew my history, that I'd be slightly different by virtue of having a penis-however briefly-inside me. That is some phallocentric bullshit if I ever heard any. Hypothetical penises don't make the rules. I make the rules. I love the rules. — Katie Heaney

There are a lot of things wrong with this particular approach to getting your girlfriend to agree to reenter a relationship with you. Probably the biggest problem is that it's a PowerPoint presentation. — Katie 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 am often wrong about the good of humanity. — Katie Heaney

In a war situation or where violence and injustice are prevalent, poetry is called upon to be something more than a thing of beauty. — Seamus Heaney

Because six-year-olds don't have real interests aside from double Dutch and Pizza Lunchables. — Katie Heaney

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

There is an amazing number of questions that fly through a person's head when the person she's just made out with tells her that the reason he can no longer make out is that he has to go do homework. At midnight. On a Saturday. The main one is just "What?" Some of the others are "How did I get here, to this place in my life?", "Can someone sweet me out of here with a cane like in the old movies?", and "What am I going to eat when I get home that could help make up for this? — Katie Heaney

The day I entered St Columb's College, my parents bought me a Conway Stewart pen. It was a special afternoon, of course. We were going to be parting that evening; they were aware of it, I was aware of it, nothing much was said about it. — Seamus Heaney

A public expectation, it has to be said, not of poetry as such but of political positions variously approvable by mutually disapproving groups. — Seamus Heaney

It has often been hard for me to know if people are serious when they talk about making T-shirts. Just to be clear: Nobody ever means it, ever. Making and wearing matching, themed T-shirts is embarrassing. Unless you want to make some with me right now, or something. — Katie Heaney

Getting started, keeping going, getting started again - in art and in life, it seems to me this is the essential rhythm not only of achievement but of survival, the ground of convinced
action, the basis of self-esteem and the guarantee of credibility in your lives, credibility to yourselves as well as to others. — Seamus Heaney

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

Without needing to be theoretically instructed, consciousness quickly realizes that it is the site of variously contending discourses. — Seamus Heaney

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

I think of the bog as a feminine goddess-ridden ground, rather like the territory of Ireland itself. — Seamus Heaney

Guys who would make fun of girls for sexual inexperience are terrible people, and when girls do it to other girls it feels even shittier. Guys who shame girls who haven't had sex want them to feel like they aren't doing their job, which is to be sexually available and attractive to guys. (And never mind if they are gay, or just uninterested.) Girls who shame other girls for these reasons are helping those guys. They are saying this: You are not accomplished where it matters, and I am better than you. I have proven that men find me attractive, and that is what counts. These people, boys and girls and men and women alike, are all dickheads. — Katie Heaney

That was their way, their heathenish hope; deep in their hearts they remembered hell. — Seamus Heaney

Imposition of the death penalty is arbitrary and capricious. Decision of who will live and who will die for his crime turns less on the nature of the offense and the incorrigibility of the offender and more on inappropriate and indefensible considerations: the political and personal inclinations of prosecutors; the defendant's wealth, race and intellect; the race and economic status of the victim; the quality of the defendant's counsel; and the resources allocated to defense lawyers. — Gerald Heaney

As a young poet, you need corroboration, and that's what publication does. — Seamus Heaney

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

I'm a firm believer in learning by heart. — 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 next move is always the test. — Seamus Heaney

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

To begin with, I wanted that truth to life to possess a concrete reliability, and rejoiced most when the poem seemed most direct, an upfront representation of the world it stood in for or stood up for or stood its ground against. — 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

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

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

Music and literature have always and continue to be massive influences. Writers such as Seamus Heaney and Frank McGuinness. I have always admired the humanitarians that I knew growing up in Derry whose influence steered me in the direction of some of the work that I have chosen in the past. — Bronagh Gallagher

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

Archibald MacLeish affirmed that 'A poem should be equal to / not true'. As a defiant statement of poetry's gift for telling truth but telling it slant, this is both cogent and corrective. 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 retuning of the world itself. We want the surprise to be transitive, like the impatient thump which unexpectedly restores the picture to the television set, or the electric shock which sets the fibrillating heart back to its proper rhythm. We want what the woman wanted in the prison queue in Leningrad, standing there blue 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 could be equal to it. — 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

Each poet probably has his or her own cupboard of magnets. For some, it is cars; for others, works of art, or certain patterns of form or sound; for others, certain stories or places, Philip Levine's Detroit, Gwendolyn Brooks's Chicago, Seamus Heaney's time-tunneled, familied Ireland. — Jane Hirshfield

Think. Learn. Act. The more you know, the better and more educated choices you have the opportunity to make. — Mehgan Heaney-Grier

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

Sex is not a wizard, whatever magical-seeming properties it might possess in its better forms. If your friend says to you, "You're being mean, you need to get laid," your problem is not sex. Your problems are that you might be acting like an asshole, and your friends are definitely idiots. — Katie Heaney

Bad girls don't feel the need to act the way girls are "supposed" to act. They don't wear pretty clothes or subtle pink makeup or waves in their hair. They talk back, often and loudly. They are viciously honest and witty and mean. They are independent and tough. — Katie Heaney

I suppose you could say my father's world was Thomas Hardy and my mother's D.H. Lawrence. — Seamus Heaney

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

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

I didn't know it yet, but he would become one of our high school's super-athletes. There were hints of athletic (and, presumably, sexual) prowess there. For one, boys as ridiculously Abercrombie- esque good-looking as he was are always sports stars throughout high school. It is a rule, a self- fulfilling prophecy. It seems as if, sometime during elementary school, coaches make note of the little boys with the most classic bone structure and the best height projections and kidnap them, training them under cover of night. Not all of them will make it in college ball (that's what people call it, right?) because by the time they're all seniors, many of them will have been riding more on the sportsman-like nature of their faces than their actual abilities. But until that day, coaches will keep putting them on the field in the most prominent and visually appealing positions because they just kind of look like that's where they should be. At least I'm pretty sure that is what's going on. — Katie Heaney

Why would I want to go out to dinner and a movie with someone I'm not completely crazy about ... getting someone else involved means I have to put on a nicer outfit and stress out about the way I look chewing my food. If I'm going to have to consider my chewing face, I only want to do it for someone I think I might be able to really like. — Katie Heaney

Early Summer, loveliest season,
The world is being colored in.
While daylight lasts on the horizon,
Sudden, throaty blackbirds sing.

The dusty-colored cuckoo cuckoos.
"Welcome, summer" is what he says.
Winter's unimaginable.
The wood's a wickerwork of boughs.

Summer means the river's shallow,
Thirsty horses nose the pools.
Long heather spreads out on bog pillows.
White bog cotton droops in bloom.

Swallows swerve and flicker up.
Music starts behind the mountain.
There's moss and a lush growth underfoot.
Spongy marshland glugs and stutters.

Bog banks shine like ravens' wings.
The cuckoo keeps on calling welcome.
The speckled fish jumps; and the strong
Swift warrior is up and running.

A little, jumpy, chirpy fellow
Hits the highest note there is;
The lark sings out his clear tidings.
Summer, shimmer, perfect days. — Marie Heaney

If, by chance, you find that you are losing hope, tap back into those who inspire you. — Mehgan Heaney-Grier

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

It doesn't matter how simple your name is; it's always a surprise to hear it spoken aloud by someone new, how the specific arrangement of syllables sounds coming out of their mouth. — Katie Heaney

All I give are fucks. And it seems to me that it might be nice, on occasion, to get rid of some of them. — Katie 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

If you only ever like people you don't know and who don't know you, the ball is perpetually in their court. Only they don't realize that you think they're playing basketball with you. They are not actually at the court. You think you're there. But really you're not there, either. — Katie Heaney

There isn't anything about me that is analogous to the Bermuda Triangle's "rogue wave" phenomenon (at least I hope there isn't). I don't capsize sailors, much less entire ships. I keep myself to myself, you know? In fact, I think that's probably what the Bermuda Triangle is up to. It doesn't mean to do any harm, and it's actually pretty nice once you get to know it. It's just that Bermuda doesn't know how to handle itself when somebody sails into its territory, because that hardly ever happens. It hasn't had much chance to practice, and it's used to things going a certain way. So if a sailor DOES come around, it gets a little nervous, freaks the fuck out, and creates hurricane-like devastation in every direction around it. And then it gets embarrassed and sad and calls its friends. — Katie Heaney

I'm going to stay a little uptight and anxious. — Katie Heaney

Fate goes ever as fate must. — Seamus Heaney

You know those high school teachers who so quintessentially and stereotypically embody their subject matter that it is as if they were cast by a director? Mr. Carter was like that. I did not know they still made glasses like his glasses. He told us his dog was named "Dooty," short for Dooty Dexy, which is a phoneticized version of the calculus formula for second derivatives. — Katie Heaney

Anyone with gumption and a sharp mind will take the measure of two things: what's said and what's done. — Seamus Heaney

So hope for a great sea-change
On the far side of revenge.
Believe that further shore
Is reachable from here.
Believe in miracles
And cures and healing wells. — Seamus Heaney

My body was braille for the creeping influences. — Seamus Heaney

The form of the poem, in other words, is crucial to poetry's power to do the thing which always is and always will be to poetry's credit: the power to persuade that vulnerable part of our consciousness of its rightness in spite of the evidence of wrongness all around it, the power to remind us that we are hunters and gatherers of values, that our very solitudes and distresses are creditable, in so far as they, too, are an earnest of our veritable human being. — Seamus Heaney

You had to come back to learn how to lose yourself, to be pilot and stray-witch, Hansel and Gretel in one. — 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

The diamond absolutes.
I am neither internee nor informer;
An inner emigre, grown long-haired
And thoughtful; a wood-kerne
Escaped from the massacre,
Taking protective colouring
From bole and bark, feeling
Every wind that blows;
Who, blowing up these sparks
For their meagre heat, have missed
The once-in-a-lifetime portent,
The comet's pulsing tose. — Seamus Heaney

The 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. — Seamus Heaney

Poetry is more a threshold than a path. — Seamus Heaney

Yeats was 18th-century oratory, almost. — Seamus Heaney

Sonnet is about movement in a form. — Seamus Heaney

I came from a farming background, and my career was teaching. — Seamus Heaney

Behaviour that's admired
is the path to power among people everywhere. — Seamus Heaney

No bit of the natural world is more valuable or more vulnerable than the tree bit. Nothing is more like ourselves, standing upright, caught between heaven and earth, frail at the extremities, yet strong at the central trunk, and nothing is closer to us at the beginning and at the end, providing the timber boards that frame both the cradle and the coffin. — Seamus Heaney

Often it seems that there are writers who are their best selves on the page. That Seamus Heaney was as genuine and deeply admirable in person as in his poems was to me a gift, then as now. — Natasha Trethewey

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

Poetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to it. — Seamus Heaney

A person cannot take the strain of maintaining lifelong crushes on every last celebrity who has ever graced her adolescent walls. We all have our reasons to let them go: They become sullen drug users, or they come out as gay, or we come out as gay, or they go and do something so terrible, so heinous, that we must forget that we were ever attracted to them in the first place. — Katie Heaney

Angela had never really got on with modern poetry. Even stuff like Seamus Heaney, Death of a Naturalist and the other book. He seemed such a lovely man and she really did try, but it sounded like prose you had to read very slowly. Old stuff she understood. Rum-ti-tum. Now sleeps the crimson petal, now the white ... Dirty British coaster with a salt-caked smoke stack ... Something going all the way back. Memorable words, so you could hand it down the generations. But free verse made her think of free knitting or free juggling. This, for example. She extracted a book at random. Spiders by Stanimir Stoilov, translated by Luke Kennard. She flipped through the pages ... the hatcheries of the moon ... the earth in my father's mouth. — Mark Haddon

Poems that come swiftly are usually the ones that you keep. — Seamus Heaney

It is difficult at times to repress the thought that history is about as instructive as an abattoir; that Tacitus was right and that peace is merely the desolation left behind after the decisive operations of merciless power. — Seamus Heaney

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

I'm not trying to be self-righteous about that, but I am literally the best friend a person could ask for and I am a good listener and anybody who doesn't want to be my friend should take a long, hard look at him/herself and whisper, What is wrong with me? Why was I born without the capacity to love? — Katie Heaney

Lighthouse people are beacons that call all the sailors in ships back to land, beckoning them in toward the light. Lighthouse people are magnetic and luminescent, so much so that even when one sailor manages to row all the way to land and climbs up into the lighthouse, the rest of the sailors will stay out there on the water, waiting for their chance to come to shore. They will feel that it's always best to keep an eye on the lighthouse, even if they have to come and go due to other sailorly obligations. The lighthouse might act like it doesn't know it's so popular with the sailors, but it does. How could it not? Even if the lighthouse has a special sailor for the moment, its light is always on. It can't help it. — Katie 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

We look the way most late-high-school, early-college-age kids look in pictures they take of one another: stupid. Stupid, and thrilled to be wherever it is that we are, with whoever we are with, right at that moment. Andy — Katie Heaney

The poet is on the side of undeceiving the world. — Seamus Heaney