Seamus Heaney quotes - page 2

So hope for a great sea-change
On the far side of revenge.
Believe that further shore
Is reachable from here.
Believe in miracles
And cures and healing wells. (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

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

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

Seamus Heaney

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

Seamus Heaney

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

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

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

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

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

Seamus Heaney

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

Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.

Seamus Heaney

Even if the last move did not succeed, the inner command says move again.

Seamus Heaney

I credit poetry for making this space-walk possible.

Seamus Heaney

Write whatever you like!

Seamus Heaney

Don't be surprised if I demur, for, be advised My passport's green. No glass of ours was ever raised To toast The Queen.

Seamus Heaney

I can't think of a case where poems changed the world, but what they do is they change people's understanding of what's going on in the world.

Seamus Heaney

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

Seamus Heaney

Behaviour that's admired is the path to power among people everywhere.

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 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

Believe in miracles and cures and healing wells.

Seamus Heaney

Human beings suffer, they torture one another, they get hurt and get hard.

Seamus Heaney

Call the miracle self-healing: The utter self-revealing double-take of feeling.

Seamus Heaney

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Seamus Heaney

Seamus Heaney - Image

Occupation: Irish Poet
Born: April 13, 1939
Died: August 30, 2013
Quotes count: 69
Wikipedia: Seamus Heaney

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