263 Quotes by Seamus Heaney

If self is a location, so is love: Bearings taken, markings, cardinal points, Options, obstinacies, dug heels, and distance, Here and there and now and then, a stance.

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.

In off the moors, down through the mist beams, god-cursed Grendel came greedily loping.

As a young poet, you need corroboration, and that's what publication does.

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

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

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

No bit of the natural world is more valuable or more vulnerable than the tree bit. Nothing is more like ourselves, standing upright, caught between heaven and earth, frail at the extremities, yet strong at the central trunk, and nothing is closer to us at the beginning and at the end, providing the timber boards that frame both the cradle and the coffin.

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