Seamus Heaney quotes - page 2

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)
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. View quote
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. View quote
Seamus Heaney
As writers and readers, as sinners and citizens, our realism and our aesthetic sense make us wary of crediting the positive note. View quote
Seamus Heaney
The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine. View quote
Seamus Heaney
I always believed that whatever had to be written would somehow get itself written. View quote
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. View quote
Seamus Heaney
Poetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to it. View quote
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. View quote
Seamus Heaney
Without needing to be theoretically instructed, consciousness quickly realizes that it is the site of variously contending discourses. View quote
Seamus Heaney
In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself. (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. View quote
Seamus Heaney
Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained. View quote
Seamus Heaney
Even if the last move did not succeed, the inner command says move again. View quote
Seamus Heaney
I credit poetry for making this space-walk possible. View quote
Seamus Heaney
Write whatever you like! View quote
Seamus Heaney
Don't be surprised if I demur, for, be advised My passport's green. No glass of ours was ever raised To toast The Queen. View quote
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. View quote
Seamus Heaney
At home in Ireland, there's a habit of avoidance, an ironical attitude towards the authority figure. View quote
Seamus Heaney
Behaviour that's admired is the path to power among people everywhere. View quote
Seamus 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)
The completely solitary self: that's where poetry comes from, and it gets isolated by crisis, and those crises are often very intimate also. View quote
Seamus Heaney
Believe in miracles and cures and healing wells. View quote
Seamus Heaney
Human beings suffer, they torture one another, they get hurt and get hard. View quote
Seamus Heaney
Call the miracle self-healing: The utter self-revealing double-take of feeling. View quote
Seamus Heaney