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The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Free Literature Study Guides
The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Seamus Heaney Quotes

One doesn’t want one’s identity coerced.

– Seamus Heaney

I’m not personally obsessed with death. At a certain age, the light that you live in is inhabited by the shades – it ’tis.

– 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

My father and mother had no sense of entitlement for their children.

– Seamus Heaney

Since I was a schoolboy, I’ve been used to being recognized on the road by old and young, and being bantered with and, indeed, being taunted.

– Seamus Heaney

If poetry and the arts do anything, they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness.

– Seamus Heaney

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

– Seamus Heaney

The experiment of poetry, as far as I am concerned, happens when the poem carries you beyond where you could have reasonably expected to go.

– Seamus Heaney

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

– Seamus Heaney

The faking of feelings is a sin against the imagination.

– Seamus Heaney

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

– 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.

– 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.

– Seamus Heaney

If you go into an underground train in London – probably anywhere, but chiefly in London – there’s that sense of almost entering a ghostly dimension. People are very still and quiet; they don’t exchange many pleasantries.

– Seamus Heaney

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

– Seamus Heaney

The kinds of truth that art gives us many, many times are small truths. They don’t have the resonance of an encyclical from the Pope stating an eternal truth, but they partake of the quality of eternity. There is a sort of timeless delight in them.

– Seamus Heaney

The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.

– Seamus Heaney

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

– Seamus Heaney

In a war situation or where violence and injustice are prevalent, poetry is called upon to be something more than a thing of beauty.

– Seamus Heaney

We go to poetry, we go to literature in general, to be forwarded within ourselves.

– Seamus Heaney

In my early teens, I acquired a kind of representative status: went on behalf of the family to wakes and funerals and so on. And I would be counted on as an adult contributor when it came to farm work – the hay in the summertime, for example.

– Seamus Heaney

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

– Seamus Heaney

What I’ve said before, only half in joke, is that everybody in Ireland is famous. Or, maybe better, say everybody is familiar.

– Seamus Heaney

Sonnet is about movement in a form.

– Seamus Heaney

I always believed that whatever had to be written would somehow get itself written.

– Seamus Heaney

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

– Seamus Heaney

I suppose you inevitably fall into habits of expression.

– Seamus Heaney

One of the best descriptions of the type of writer I am was given by Tom Paulin, who described himself as a ‘binge’ writer – like a binge drinker. I go on binges.

– Seamus Heaney

Poetry is more a threshold than a path.

– Seamus Heaney

My passport’s green.

– Seamus Heaney

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