59 Quotes & Sayings By Seamus Heaney

It is always betterto avenge dear ones than to indulge in mourning. For every one of us, living in this worldmeans waiting for our end. Let whoever canwin glory before death. When a warrior is gone, that will be his best and only bulwark. Seamus Heaney

The main thing is to writefor the joy of it. Cultivate a work-lustthat imagines its haven like your hands at nightdreaming the sun in the sunspot of a breast. You are fasted now, light-headed, dangerous. Take off from here. Seamus Heaney

DiggingBetween my finger and my thumb The squat pen rests; snug as a gun. Under my window, a clean rasping sound When the spade sinks into gravelly ground: My father, digging. I look down Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds Bends low, comes up twenty years away Stooping in rhythm through potato drills Where he was digging. The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft Against the inside knee was levered firmly. He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep To scatter new potatoes that we picked, Loving their cool hardness in our hands. By God, the old man could handle a spade. Just like his old man. My grandfather cut more turf in a day Than any other man on Toner’s bog. Once I carried him milk in a bottle Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up To drink it, then fell to right away Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods Over his shoulder, going down and down For the good turf. Digging.The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge Through living roots awaken in my head. But I’ve no spade to follow men like them. Between my finger and my thumb The squat pen rests. I’ll dig with it. Seamus Heaney

The way we are living, timorous or bold, will have been our life. Seamus Heaney

Sink every impulse like a bolt. Secure The bastion of sensation. Do not waver Into language. Do not waver in it. Seamus Heaney

Words...To lure the tribal shoals to epigram / And order. Seamus Heaney

Mid-Term BreakI sat all morning in the college sick bay Counting bells knelling classes to a close. At two o'clock our neighbours drove me home. In the porch I met my father crying– He had always taken funerals in his stride– And Big Jim Evans saying it was a hard blow. The baby cooed and laughed and rocked the pram When I came in, and I was embarrassed By old men standing up to shake my hand And tell me they were 'sorry for my trouble'. Whispers informed strangers I was the eldest, Away at school, as my mother held my hand In hers and coughed out angry tearless sighs. At ten o'clock the ambulance arrived With the corpse, stanched and bandaged by the nurses. Next morning I went up into the room. SnowdropsAnd candles soothed the bedside; I saw him For the first time in six weeks. Paler now, Wearing a poppy bruise on his left temple, He lay in the four-foot box as in his cot. No gaudy scars, the bumper knocked him clear. A four-foot box, a foot for every year. Seamus Heaney

Fate goes ever as fate must. Seamus Heaney

More than loud acclaim, I love Books, silence, thought, my alcove. Pangur BánPoem by Anon Irish Monk, Translated by Seamus Heaney Seamus Heaney

Believe that a further shore is reachable from here. Seamus Heaney

That was their way, their heathenish hope; deep in their hearts they remembered hell. Seamus Heaney

To work, her dumb lunge says, is to move a certain mass...through a certain distance, is to pull your weight and feelexact and equal to it. Feel dragged upon. And buoyant. Seamus Heaney

Don’t have the veins bulging in your biro. Seamus Heaney

It is a great wonder How Almighty God in his magnificence Favors our race with rank and scope And the gift of wisdom; His sway is wide. Sometimes He allows the mind of a man Of distinguished birth to follow its bent, Grants him fulfillment and felicity on earth And forts to command in his own country. He permits him to lord it in many lands Until the man in his unthinkingness Forgets that it will ever end for him. He indulges his desires; illness and old age Mean nothing to him; his mind is untroubled By envy or malice or thought of enemies With their hate-honed swords. The whole world Conforms to his will, he is kept from the worst Until an element of overweening Enters him and takes hold While the soul’s guard, its sentry, drowses, Grown too distracted. A killer stalks him, An archer who draws a deadly bow. And then the man is hit in the heart, The arrow flies beneath his defenses, The devious promptings of the demon start. His old possessions seem paltry to him now. He covets and resents; dishonors custom And bestows no gold; and because of good things That the Heavenly powers gave him in the past He ignores the shape of things to come. Then finally the end arrives When the body he was lent collapses and falls Prey to its death; ancestral possessions And the goods he hoarded and inherited by another Who lets them go with a liberal hand.“ O flower of warriors, beware of that trap. Choose, dear Beowulf, the better part, Eternal rewards. Do not give way to pride. For a brief while your strength is in bloom But it fades quickly; and soon there will follow Illness or the sword to lay you low, Or a sudden fire or surge of water Or jabbing blade or javelin from the air Or repellent age. Your piercing eye Will dim and darken; and death will arrive, Dear warrior, to sweep you away. Seamus Heaney

And a young prince must be prudent like that, giving freely while his father livesso that afterwards, in age when fighting startssteadfast companions will stand by himand hold the line. Seamus Heaney

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

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

I spend almost every morning with mail. Seamus Heaney

I don't think my intelligence is naturally analytic or political. Seamus Heaney

I'm a firm believer in learning by heart. 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

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

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

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

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

We go to poetry, we go to literature in general, to be forwarded within ourselves. Seamus Heaney

Poetry is what we do to break bread with the dead. Seamus Heaney

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

In a way, Anglo-Saxon poetry cannot be translated. Seamus Heaney

In Northern Ireland, helicopters are not usually used to promote poetry. Seamus Heaney

Anybody serious about poetry knows how hard it is to achieve anything worthwhile in it. 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

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

I credit poetry for making this space-walk possible. 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

Dylan Thomas is now as much a case history as a chapter in the history of poetry. 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

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

The experimental poetry thing is not my thing. It's a programme of the avant-garde: basically a refusal of the kind of poetry I write. Seamus Heaney

The experiment of poetry, as far as I am concerned, happens when the poem carries you beyond where you could have reasonably expected to go. Seamus Heaney

In the United States, in poetry workshops, it's now quite a thing to make graduate students learn poems by heart. Seamus Heaney

In poetry, everything can be faked but the intensity of utterance. Seamus Heaney

Tom Sleigh's poetry is hard-earned and well founded. I great admire the way it refuses to cut emotional corners and yet achieves a sense of lyric absolution. Seamus Heaney

Poetry is a domestic art, most itself when most at home. Seamus Heaney

Poetry is more a threshold than a path. Seamus Heaney