Seamus Heaney Quotes - Page 1

• Seamus Heaney / Poet

My passport's green.

• Seamus Heaney / Poet

The end of art is peace.

• Seamus Heaney / Poet

Write whatever you like!

• Seamus Heaney / Poet

I shall gain glory or die.

• Seamus Heaney / Poet

Poetry is language in orbit.

• Seamus Heaney / Poet

The next move is always the test.

• Seamus Heaney / Poet

All I know is a door into the dark

• Seamus Heaney / Poet

If self is a location, so is love.

• Seamus Heaney / Poet

Sonnet is about movement in a form.

• Seamus Heaney / Poet

I drink to keep body and soul apart.

• Seamus Heaney / Poet

The murder of Sean Brown hurt my soul.

• Seamus Heaney / Poet

Poetry is more a threshold than a path.

• Seamus Heaney / Poet

I spend almost every morning with mail.

• Seamus Heaney / Poet

Yeats was 18th-century oratory, almost.

• Seamus Heaney / Poet

Im a firm believer in learning by heart.

• Seamus Heaney / Poet

One doesn't want one's identity coerced.

• Seamus Heaney / Poet

I've been in the habit of helping people.

• Seamus Heaney / Poet

I'm a firm believer in learning by heart.

• Seamus Heaney / Poet

Walk on air against your better judgement.

• Seamus Heaney / Poet

Wherever that man went, he went gratefully.

• Seamus Heaney / Poet

Strange, it is a huge nothing that we fear.

• Seamus Heaney / Poet

The gift of writing is to be self-forgetful...

• Seamus Heaney / Poet

My body was braille for the creeping influences.

• Seamus Heaney / Poet

The poet is on the side of undeceiving the world.

• Seamus Heaney / Poet

I believe we are put here to improve civilisation.

• Seamus Heaney / Poet

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

• Seamus Heaney / Poet

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

• Seamus Heaney / Poet

I credit poetry for making this space-walk possible.

• Seamus Heaney / Poet

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

• Seamus Heaney / Poet

Believe that a further shore is reachable from here.

• Seamus Heaney / Poet

A person from Northern Ireland is naturally cautious.

• Seamus Heaney / Poet

There's never going to be a united Ireland, you know.

• Seamus Heaney / Poet

History says, 'Don't hope on this side of the grave.'

• Seamus Heaney / Poet

Suspect too much sweet talk but never close your mind.

• Seamus Heaney / Poet

I suppose I did feel a certain public pressure always.

• Seamus Heaney / Poet

Eternal life can mean utter reverence for life itself.

• Seamus Heaney / Poet

Poetry is a domestic art, most itself when most at home.

• Seamus Heaney / Poet

I think of Dermot Healy as the heir to Patrick Kavanagh.

• Seamus Heaney / Poet

I suppose you inevitably fall into habits of expression.

• Seamus Heaney / Poet

The faking of feelings is a sin against the imagination.

• Seamus Heaney / Poet

Poems that come swiftly are usually the ones that you keep.

• Seamus Heaney / Poet

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

• Seamus Heaney / Poet

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

• Seamus Heaney / Poet

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

• Seamus Heaney / Poet

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

• Seamus Heaney / Poet

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

• Seamus Heaney / Poet

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

• Seamus Heaney / Poet

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

• Seamus Heaney / Poet

I don't think my intelligence is naturally analytic or political.

• Seamus Heaney / Poet

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