263 Quotes by Seamus Heaney

I'm very conscious that people dear to me are alive in my imagination - poets in particular.

Strange, it is a huge nothing that we fear.

The completely solitary self: that's where poetry comes from, and it gets isolated by crisis, and those crises are often very intimate also.

The gift of writing is to be self-forgetful … to get a surge of inner life or inner supply or unexpected sense of empowerment, to be afloat, to be out of yourself.

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

Write whatever you like!

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

You had to come back to learn how to lose yourself, to be pilot and stray-witch, Hansel and Gretel in one.

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