Quotes By 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
Without needing to be theoretically instructed, consciousness quickly realizes that it is the site of variously contending discourses.
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
Then as the years went on and my listening became more deliberate, I would climb up on an arm of our big sofa to get my ear closer to the wireless speaker.
Seamus Heaney
I suppose you could say my father's world was Thomas Hardy and my mother's D.H. Lawrence.
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
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
When I first encountered the name of the city of Stockholm, I little thought that I would ever visit it, never mind end up being welcomed to it as a guest of the Swedish Academy and the Nobel Foundation.
Seamus Heaney
In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself.
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
At home in Ireland, there's a habit of avoidance, an ironical attitude towards the authority figure.
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
Manifesting that order of poetry where we can at last grow up to that which we stored up as we grew.
Seamus Heaney
I've always associated the moment of writing with a moment of lift, of joy, of unexpected reward.
Seamus Heaney
The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.
Seamus Heaney