“Poetry is language in orbit.”
Source: Finders Keepers: Selected Prose 1971 - 2001
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Famous Seamus Heaney Quotes
“The bogholes might be Atlantic seepage. The wet centre is bottomless.”
Source: Finders Keepers: Selected Prose 1971-2001
“But even so, none of the news of these world-spasms entered me as terror.”
Source: Opened Ground: Selected Poems, 1966-1996
“Don't be surprised if I demur, for, be advised my passport's green.”
Source: Opened Ground: Selected Poems, 1966-1996
Source: Opened Ground: Selected Poems, 1966-1996
“Suspect too much sweet talk but never close your mind.”
Source: Opened Ground
“Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.”
“I've always associated the moment of writing with a moment of lift, of joy, of unexpected reward.”
“Even if the last move did not succeed, the inner command says move again.”
“I always believed that whatever had to be written would somehow get itself written.”
“I have begun to think of life as a series of ripples widening out from an original center.”
“Poetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to it.”
“There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you.”
Source: Crediting Poetry: The Nobel Lecture
“The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.”
Source: Opened Ground: Selected Poems, 1966-1996
Source: Crediting Poetry: The Nobel Lecture
Source: Opened Ground: Selected Poems, 1966-1996
Source: Crediting Poetry: The Nobel Lecture
Source: Opened Ground: Selected Poems, 1966-1996
Source: Opened Ground: Selected Poems, 1966-1996
Source: Opened Ground: Selected Poems, 1966-1996
“My teaching was animated by what I was reading and being excited by as a poet.”
“I don't miss teaching. I'm learning to take my time for myself.”