263 Quotes by Seamus Heaney

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

We were small and thought we knew nothing Worth knowing. We thought words travelled the wires In the shiny pouches of raindrops, Each one seeded full with the light Of the sky, the gleam of the lines, and ourselves So infinitesimally scaled We could stream through the eye of a needle.

But death is not easily escaped from by anyone: all of us with souls, earth-dwellers and children of men, must make our way to a destination already ordained where the body, after the banqueting, sleeps on its deathbed.

I have always thought of poems as stepping stones in one’s own sense of oneself.

Loyalism, or Unionism, or Protestantism, or whatever you want to call it, in Northern Ireland – it operates not as a class system, but a caste system.

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.

You carried your own burden and very soon your symptoms of creeping privilege disappeared.

What do we say any more to conjure the salt of our earth? So much comes and is gone that should be crystal and kept, and amicable weathers that bring up the grain of things, their tang of season and store, are all the packing we’ll get.

I might enjoy being an albatross, being able to glide for days and daydream for hundreds of miles along the thermals. And then being able to hang like an affliction round some people’s necks.