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Seamus Heaney (Writer)

I have always thought of poems as stepping stones in one's own sense of oneself. Every now and again, you write a poem that gives you self-respect and steadies your going a little bit farther out in the stream. At the same time, you have to conjure the next stepping stone because the stream, we hope, keeps flowing.

— Seamus Heaney hope

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 hate

Memory has always been fundamental for me. In fact, remembering what I had forgotten is the way most of the poems get started.

— Seamus Heaney art

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

— Seamus Heaney hope

I have begun to think of life as a series of ripples widening out from an original center.

— Seamus Heaney life

Anyone born and bred in Northern Ireland can't be too optimistic.

— Seamus Heaney

The faking of feelings is a sin against the imagination.

— Seamus Heaney imagination

The amount of sensory material stored up or stored down in the brain's and the body's systems is inestimable. It's like a culture at the bottom of a jar, although it doesn't grow, I think, or help anything else to grow unless you find a way to reach it and touch it.

— Seamus Heaney culture

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

— Seamus Heaney man

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

— Seamus Heaney relationship

If poetry and the arts do anything, they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness.

— Seamus Heaney life

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 poetry

I've always associated the moment of writing with a moment of lift, of joy, of unexpected reward.

— Seamus Heaney writing

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

— Seamus Heaney self

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 poetry

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

— Seamus Heaney war

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 life

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

— Seamus Heaney truth

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 marriage

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

— Seamus Heaney help

My passport's green.

— 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

I'm a firm believer in learning by heart.

— Seamus Heaney art

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

— Seamus Heaney consciousness

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 mind

If you have the words, theres always a chance that youll find the way.

— Seamus Heaney words

Behaviour thats admired is the path to power among people everywhere.

— Seamus Heaney people

Believe that further shore is reachable from here. Believe in miracle and cures and healing wells.

— Seamus Heaney healing

I have always thought of poems as stepping stones in ones own sense of oneself. Every now and again, you write a poem that gives you self-respect and steadies your going a little bit farther out in the stream. At the same time, you have to conjure the next stepping stone because the stream, we hope, keeps flowing.

— Seamus Heaney hope

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