Seamus Heaney Quotes

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Seamus Heaney

Profession : Poet

Birth : April 13, 1939

I don't do as many readings as I used to. There was a time when I was on the road a lot more, at home in Ireland, in Britain, in Canada and the States, a time when I had more stamina and appetite for it.

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

Every time you read a poem aloud to yourself in the presence of others, you are reading it into yourself and them. Voice helps to carry words farther and deeper than the eye.

Seamus Heaney

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

Seamus Heaney

Dylan Thomas is now as much a case history as a chapter in the history of poetry.

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

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

Seamus Heaney

The group of writers I had grown up with in the '60s - Derek Mahon, Michael Longley, James Simmons, John Hewitt, Paul Muldoon - formed a very necessary and self-sustaining group.

Seamus Heaney

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

Seamus Heaney

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

Seamus Heaney

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

Seamus Heaney

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

Seamus Heaney

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

Seamus Heaney

Memory has always been fundamental for me. In fact, remembering what I had forgotten is the way most of the poems get started.

Seamus Heaney

The end of art is peace.

Seamus Heaney

Poetry is more a threshold than a path.

Seamus Heaney

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

Seamus Heaney

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

Seamus Heaney

A person from Northern Ireland is naturally cautious.

Seamus Heaney

I think the first little jolt I got was reading Gerard Manley Hopkins - I liked other poems... but Hopkins was kind of electric for me - he changed the rules with speech, and the whole intensity of the language was there and so on.

Seamus Heaney