Seamus Heaney quotes - page 3

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)
I suppose you could say my father's world was Thomas Hardy and my mother's D.H. Lawrence. View quote
Seamus Heaney
Loyalism, or Unionism, or Protestantism, or whatever you want to call it, in Northern Ireland - it operates not as a class system, but a caste system. View quote
Seamus Heaney
Manifesting that order of poetry where we can at last grow up to that which we stored up as we grew. View quote
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. View quote
Seamus Heaney
I've nothing against the Queen personally. I had lunch at the Palace once upon a time. View quote
Seamus Heaney
Memory has always been fundamental for me. In fact, remembering what I had forgotten is the way most of the poems get started. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
Seamus Heaney
Im a firm believer in learning by heart. View quote
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)
The external reality and inner dynamic of happenings in Northern Ireland between 1968 and 1974 were symptomatic of change, violent change admittedly, but change nevertheless, and for the minority living there, change had been long overdue. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
Seamus Heaney
But even so, none of the news of these world-spasms entered me as terror. View quote
Seamus Heaney
In off the moors, down through the mist beams, god-cursed Grendel came greedily loping. View quote
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. View quote
Seamus Heaney
On the contrary, a trust in the staying power and travel-worthiness of such good should encourage us to credit the possibility of a world where respect for the validity of every tradition will issue in the creation and maintenance of a salubrious political space. View quote
Seamus Heaney
History says don't hope On this side of the grave. But then, once in a lifetime The longed for tidal wave Of justice can rise up And hope and history rhyme. So hope for a great sea-change on the far side of revenge. Believe that a further shore is reachable from here. Believe in miracles and cures and healing wells. View quote
Seamus Heaney