Seamus Heaney – 12 Quotes

12 Quotes by Seamus Heaney

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

– Seamus Heaney

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

– 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

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

I credit poetry for making this space-walk possible.

– Seamus Heaney

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

– 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

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

– 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

The fact of the matter is that the most unexpected and miraculous thing in my life was the arrival in it of poetry itself – as a vocation and an elevation almost.

– Seamus Heaney

As writers and readers, as sinners and citizens, our realism and our aesthetic sense make us wary of crediting the positive note.

– 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