263 Quotes by Seamus Heaney

Once off the bush The fruit fermented, the sweet flesh would turn sour. I always felt like crying. It wasn't fair That all the lovely canfuls smelt of rot. Each year I hoped they'd keep, knew they would not. -Blackberry picking

I rhyme… to see myself, to set the darkness echoing.

You yourself don't have to be shaken by mortal danger in order to feel your mortality.

My father and mother had no sense of entitlement for their children.

The thing about writing is that if you have the impulse, you will find the time.

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

The main thing is to write for the joy of it. Cultivate a work-lust that imagines its haven like your hands at night dreaming the sun in the sunspot of a breast. You are fasted now, light-headed, dangerous. Take off from here.

A person from Northern Ireland is naturally cautious.

The ability to start out upon your own impulse is fundamental to the gift of keeping going upon your own terms. . . . Getting started, keeping going, getting started again in art and in life, it seems to me this is the essential rhythm.