Top 90 Seamus Heaney Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.”

— Seamus Heaney

52. “I’ve always associated the moment of writing with a moment of lift, of joy, of unexpected reward.”

— Seamus Heaney

53. “In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself.”

— Seamus Heaney

54. “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

55. “I always believed that whatever had to be written would somehow get itself written.”

— Seamus Heaney

56. “The bogholes might be Atlantic seepage. The wet centre is bottomless.”

— Seamus Heaney

57. “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

58. “But death is not easily escaped from by anyone: all of us with souls, earth-dwellers and children of men, must make our way to a destination already ordained where the body, after the banqueting, sleeps on its deathbed.”

— Seamus Heaney

59. “Over the waves, with the wind behind her and foam at her neck, she flew like a bird until her curved prow had covered the distance...”

— Seamus Heaney

60. “Once off the bush The fruit fermented, the sweet flesh would turn sour. I always felt like crying. It wasn’t fair That all the lovely canfuls smelt of rot. Each year I hoped they’d keep, knew they would not. -Blackberry picking.”

— Seamus Heaney

61. “Poetry cannot afford to lose its fundamentally self-delighting inventiveness, its joy in being a process of language as well as a representation of things in the world.”

— Seamus Heaney

62. “In off the moors, down through the mist beams, god-cursed Grendel came greedily loping.”

— Seamus Heaney

63. “Was music once a proof of God’s existence? As long as it admits things beyond measure, That supposition stands.”

— Seamus Heaney

64. “Im a firm believer in learning by heart.”

— Seamus Heaney

65. “The main thing is to write for the joy of it. Cultivate a work-lust that imagines its haven like your hands at night dreaming the sun in the sunspot of a breast. You are fasted now, light-headed, dangerous. Take off from here.”

— Seamus Heaney

66. “What do we say any more to conjure the salt of our earth? So much comes and is gone that should be crystal and kept, and amicable weathers that bring up the grain of things, their tang of season and store, are all the packing we’ll get.”

— Seamus Heaney

67. “That was their way, their heathenish hope; deep in their hearts they remembered hell.”

— Seamus Heaney

68. “God is a foreman with certain definite views Who orders life in shifts of work and leisure.”

— Seamus Heaney

69. “At home in Ireland, there’s a habit of avoidance, an ironical attitude towards the authority figure.”

— Seamus Heaney

70. “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

71. “We were small and thought we knew nothing Worth knowing. We thought words travelled the wires In the shiny pouches of raindrops, Each one seeded full with the light Of the sky, the gleam of the lines, and ourselves So infinitesimally scaled We could stream through the eye of a needle.”

— Seamus Heaney

72. “Let whoever can win glory before death.”

— Seamus Heaney

73. “To begin with, I wanted that truth to life to possess a concrete reliability, and rejoiced most when the poem seemed most direct, an upfront representation of the world it stood in for or stood up for or stood its ground against.”

— Seamus Heaney

74. “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

75. “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

76. “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

77. “It has as much to do with the energy released by linguistic fission and fusion, with the buoyancy generated by cadence and tone and rhyme and stanza, as it has to do with the poem’s concerns or the poet’s truthfulness.”

— Seamus Heaney

78. “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

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

— Seamus Heaney

80. “Desmond O’Grady is one of the senior figures in Irish Literary life, exemplary in the way he has committed himself over the decades to the vocation of poetry and has lived selflessly for the art.”

— Seamus Heaney

81. “As writers and readers, as sinners and citizens, our realism and our aesthetic sense make us wary of crediting the positive note.”

— Seamus Heaney

82. “Only the very stupid or the very deprived can any longer help knowing that the documents of civilization have been written in blood and tears, blood and tears no less real for being very remote.”

— Seamus Heaney

83. “As writers and readers, as sinners and citizens, our realism and our aesthetic sense make us wary of crediting the positive note. The very gunfire braces us and the atrocious confers a worth upon the effort which it calls forth to confront it.”

— Seamus Heaney

84. “But even so, none of the news of these world-spasms entered me as terror.”

— Seamus Heaney

85. “I’ve nothing against the Queen personally: I had lunch at the Palace once upon a time.”

— Seamus Heaney

86. “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

87. “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

88. “Without needing to be theoretically instructed, consciousness quickly realizes that it is the site of variously contending discourses.”

— Seamus Heaney

89. “The external reality and inner dynamic of happenings in Northern Ireland between 1968 and 1974 were symptomatic of change, violent change admittedly, but change nevertheless, and for the minority living there, change had been long overdue.”

— Seamus Heaney

90. “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

91. “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

92. “I am not a playwright. A playwright would take Antigone and hit it a few clouts and knock it out of shape and restructure it. My versioning was strictly verbal.”

— Seamus Heaney

93. “I suppose I’m saying that defiance is actually part of the lyric job.”

— Seamus Heaney

94. “And so he mourned as he moved about the world, deserted and alone, lamenting his unhappiness day and night, until death’s flood brimmed up in his heart.”

— Seamus Heaney

95. “Which would be better, what sticks or what falls through? Or does the choice itself create the value?”

— Seamus Heaney

96. “The space we stood around had been emptied into us to keep.”

— Seamus Heaney

97. “The gods do grant immunity, you see, To everybody except the true and the just.”

— Seamus Heaney