Seamus Heaney

Seamus Heaney

"Anybody serious about poetry knows how hard it is to achieve anything worthwhile in it."
55 Quotes
"Anybody serious about poetry knows how hard it is to achieve anything worthwhile in it."
Seamus Heaney
"In Northern Ireland, helicopters are not usually used to promote poetry."
Seamus Heaney
"In a way, Anglo-Saxon poetry cannot be translated."
Seamus Heaney
"If poetry and the arts do anything, they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness."
Seamus Heaney
"Poetry is what we do to break bread with the dead."
Seamus Heaney
"We go to poetry, we go to literature in general, to be forwarded within ourselves."
Seamus Heaney
"The faking of feelings is a sin against the imagination."
Seamus Heaney
"I'm very conscious that people dear to me are alive in my imagination - poets in particular."
Seamus Heaney
"In a war situation or where violence and injustice are prevalent, poetry is called upon to be something more than a thing of beauty."
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
"In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself."
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'm a firm believer in learning by heart."
Seamus Heaney
"I don't think my intelligence is naturally analytic or political."
Seamus Heaney
"I spend almost every morning with mail."
Seamus Heaney
"What I've said before, only half in joke, is that everybody in Ireland is famous. Or, maybe better, say everybody is familiar."
Seamus Heaney
"Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained."
Seamus Heaney
"At home in Ireland, there's a habit of avoidance, an ironical attitude towards the authority figure."
Seamus Heaney
"If you have the words, there's always a chance that you'll find the way."
Seamus Heaney Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney
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