Seamus Heaney Quotes

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

Believe that a further shore is reachable from here.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

I have begun to think of life as a series of ripples widening out from an original center.

All I know is a door into the dark

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

I drink to keep body and soul apart.

The end of art is peace.

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.

At home in Ireland, there's a habit of avoidance, an ironical attitude towards the authority figure.

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

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

Two buckets were easier carried than one. / I grew up in between.

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.

Walk on air against your better judgement.

Memory has always been fundamental for me. In fact, remembering what I had forgotten is the way most of the poems get started.

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.

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.

Once off the bush The fruit fermented, the sweet flesh would turn sour. I always felt like crying. It wasn't fair That all the lovely canfuls smelt of rot. Each year I hoped they'd keep, knew they would not. -Blackberry picking

Suspect too much sweet talk but never close your mind.

Hope for a great sea-change timid to rebuke and too petty to forgive.

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.

I've always associated the moment of writing with a moment of lift, of joy, of unexpected reward.

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.

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.

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.

I rhyme… to see myself, to set the darkness echoing.

I felt implicated in American affairs.Outraged at the blatant lies about Iraqs involvement in al Qaeda, at the regimes arrogance and stupidity, Guantnamo Bay and all the rest of it. But the poems at the start of District and Circle Anahorish 1944, The Aerodromearent particularly aimed as criticism. On the contrary, there's a recognition of the big contribution to world order made in Europe during World War II.

The next move is always the test.

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.

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

In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself.

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.

The whole relationship between a writer's spiritual/emotional condition and the kind of wordstuff and form-making that's going on in his work is an interesting one. When I was an undergraduate, there was a glib notion around that there was no reason to suppose a bad man could be a good writer.

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

Debate doesn’t really change things. It gets you bogged in deeper. If you can address or reopen the subject with something new, something from a different angle, then there is some hope. ... People are suddenly gazing at something else and pausing for a moment. And for the duration of that gaze and pause, they are like reflectors of the totality of their own knowledge and/or ignorance. That’s something poetry can do for you, it can entrance you for a moment above the pool of your own consciousness and your own possibilities.

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.

A writer is not different from a reader, in that the common ragbag of orthodoxies and assumptions is what a poet has to work with as well.

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

I don't miss teaching. I'm learning to take my time for myself.

Between my finger and my thumb The squat pen rests; snug as a gun. ~from the poem "Digging

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.

The thing about writing is that if you have the impulse, you will find the time.