If we winter this one out, we can summer anywhere. – Seamus Heaney Attributed, and much quoted to offer hope during coronavirus pandemic.
The Heaneys were aristocrats, in the sense that they took for granted a code of behavior that was given and unspoken. Argumentation, persuasion, speech itself, for God’s sake, just seemed otiose and superfluous to them. – Seamus Heaney
Without needing to be theoretically instructed, consciousness quickly realizes that it is the site of variously contending discourses. – Seamus Heaney
The amount of sensory material stored up or stored down in the brain’s and the body’s systems is inestimable. It’s like a culture at the bottom of a jar, although it doesn’t grow, I think, or help anything else to grow unless you find a way to reach it and touch it. – 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. – 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. – Seamus Heaney
I feel myself part of something. Not only being part of a community but part of an actual moment and a movement of Irish writing and art. That sense of being part of the whole thing is the deepest joy. – 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
The kind of poet who founds and reconstitutes values is somebody like Yeats or Whitman – these are public value-founders. – Seamus Heaney
Manifesting that order of poetry where we can at last grow up to that which we stored up as we grew. – Seamus Heaney
To encounter ‘Beowulf’ is like taking a sledgehammer to a quarry face. You must bang in there. – Seamus Heaney
My father was a creature of the archaic world, really. He would have been entirely at home in a Gaelic hill-fort. His side of the family, and the houses I associate with his side of the family, belonged to a traditional rural Ireland. – Seamus Heaney
I think of the bog as a feminine goddess-ridden ground, rather like the territory of Ireland itself. – 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. – Seamus Heaney
Poetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to it. – Seamus Heaney
My experience is that prose usually equals duty – last minute, overdue-deadline stuff or a panic lecture to be written. – 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. – Seamus Heaney
In the United States, in poetry workshops, it’s now quite a thing to make graduate students learn poems by heart. – 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. – Seamus Heaney
Anybody serious about poetry knows how hard it is to achieve anything worthwhile in it. – 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. – Seamus Heaney
I’ve said it before about the Nobel Prize: it’s like being struck by a more or less benign avalanche. It was unexpected, unlooked for, and extraordinary. – Seamus Heaney
