Seamus Heaney Quotes

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Seamus Heaney

Profession : Poet

Birth : April 13, 1939

Poetry is a domestic art, most itself when most at home.

Seamus Heaney

I think childhood is, generally speaking, a preparation for disappointment.

Seamus Heaney

I would say that something important for me and for my generation in Northern Ireland was the 1947 Education Act, which allowed students who won scholarships to go on to secondary schools and thence to university.

Seamus Heaney

I believe we are put here to improve civilisation.

Seamus Heaney

The problem as you get older... is that you become more self-aware. At the same time, you have to surprise yourself. There's no way of arranging the surprise, so it is tricky.

Seamus Heaney

The day I entered St Columb's College, my parents bought me a Conway Stewart pen. It was a special afternoon, of course. We were going to be parting that evening; they were aware of it, I was aware of it, nothing much was said about it.

Seamus Heaney

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

Seamus Heaney

The gift of writing is to be self-forgetful, to get a surge of inner life or inner supply or unexpected sense of empowerment, to be afloat, to be out of yourself.

Seamus Heaney

I think that water is immediately interesting. It's just, as an element, it is full of life. It is associated with origin; it is bright - it reflects you.

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

You yourself don't have to be shaken by mortal danger in order to feel your mortality.

Seamus Heaney

Your temperament is what you write with, but it's also how you deal with the world.

Seamus Heaney

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

Seamus Heaney

I'm a firm believer in learning by heart.

Seamus Heaney

Eternal life can mean utter reverence for life itself.

Seamus Heaney

In Northern Ireland, helicopters are not usually used to promote poetry.

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

To encounter 'Beowulf' is like taking a sledgehammer to a quarry face. You must bang in there.

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

I credit poetry for making this space-walk possible.

Seamus Heaney