Beowulf Seamus Heaney Quotes

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

It is very true to say that work done by writers is quite often an attempt to give solid expression to that which is bothering them ... They feel they have got it right if they express the stress. ~ Seamus Heaney

Since when," he asked,
"Are the first line and last line of any poem
Where the poem begins and ends? ~ Seamus Heaney

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. ~ Seamus Heaney

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

Be the necklace-fire of stars,
The cauterizing lightning.
Bewilder us with good. ~ Seamus Heaney

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

I think the poetry that came out of Belfast, and especially the Queen's University set, in the 1970s and '80s - you know, Paul Muldoon and Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon and Ciaran Carson - that was probably the finest body of work since the Gaelic renaissance, up there with the work of Yeats and Synge and Lady Gregory. ~ Adrian McKinty

In my writing, I strive for a lyrical beauty somewhere between Tolkien at his best and Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf ~ Christopher Paolini

How perilous is it to choose not to love the life we're shown? ~ Seamus Heaney

The faking of feelings is a sin against the imagination. ~ 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

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. ~ 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

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

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. ~ 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

Poetry is language in orbit. ~ Seamus Heaney

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. ~ Seamus Heaney

Is there life before death? That's chalked up
In Ballymurphy. Competence with pain,
Coherent miseries, a bite and a sup,
We hug our little destiny again. ~ Seamus Heaney

I'm very conscious that people dear to me are alive in my imagination - poets in particular. ~ Seamus Heaney

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

Happy the man ... with a natural gift
for practising the right one [art] from the start
poetry, say, or fishing; whose nights are dreamless;
whose deep-sunk panoramas rise and pass
like daylight through the rod's eye or the nib's eye. ~ Seamus Heaney

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

I suppose you could say my father's world was Thomas Hardy and my mother's D.H. Lawrence. ~ Seamus Heaney

By God, the old man could handle a spade.
Just like his old man. ~ Seamus Heaney

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

A four foot box, a foot for every year. ~ Seamus Heaney

So hope for a great sea-change
On the far side of revenge.
Believe that further shore
Is reachable from here.
Believe in miracles
And cures and healing wells. ~ Seamus Heaney

But every now and then, just weighing in is what it must come down to, and without any self-exculpation or self-pity. ~ Seamus Heaney

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

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

Eternal life can mean utter reverence for life itself. ~ Seamus Heaney

But even so, none of the news of these world-spasms entered me as terror. ~ Seamus Heaney

The poet is on the side of undeceiving the world. ~ Seamus Heaney

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

Useless to think you'll park and capture it
More thoroughly. You are neither here nor there,
A hurry through which known and strange things pass
As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways
And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.

"Postscript ~ Seamus Heaney

All I know is a door into the dark ~ Seamus Heaney