Seamus Heaney Quotes

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Seamus Heaney

Profession : Poet

Birth : April 13, 1939

My passport's green.

Seamus Heaney

One doesn't want one's identity coerced.

Seamus Heaney

I think of the bog as a feminine goddess-ridden ground, rather like the territory of Ireland itself.

Seamus Heaney

There's never going to be a united Ireland, you know.

Seamus Heaney

I've been in the habit of helping people.

Seamus Heaney

Yeats was 18th-century oratory, almost.

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

My language and my sensibility are yearning to admit a kind of religious or transcendent dimension. But then there's the reality: there's no Heaven, no afterlife of the sort we were promised, and no personal God.

Seamus Heaney

I always had a superstitious fear of setting up a too well-designed writing place and then finding that the writing had absconded.

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

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

Seamus Heaney

It's difficult to learn poems off by heart that don't rhyme.

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

The Heaneys were aristocrats, in the sense that they took for granted a code of behavior that was given and unspoken. Argumentation, persuasion, speech itself, for God's sake, just seemed otiose and superfluous to them.

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

The poet is on the side of undeceiving the world.

Seamus Heaney

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

Seamus Heaney

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

Seamus Heaney

You can have Irish identity in the north and also have your Irish passport.

Seamus Heaney