263 Quotes by Seamus Heaney

The form of the poem, in other words, is crucial to poetry’s power to do the thing which always is and always will be to poetry’s credit: the power to persuade that vulnerable part of our consciousness of its rightness in spite of the evidence of wrongness all around it, the power to remind us that we are hunters and gatherers of values, that our very solitudes and distresses are creditable, in so far as they, too, are an earnest of our veritable human being.

Desmond O’Grady is one of the senior figures in Irish Literary life, exemplary in the way he has committed himself over the decades to the vocation of poetry and has lived selflessly for the art.

It is difficult at times to repress the thought that history is about as instructive as an abattoir.

It has as much to do with the energy released by linguistic fission and fusion, with the buoyancy generated by cadence and tone and rhyme and stanza, as it has to do with the poem’s concerns or the poet’s truthfulness.

The gift of writing is to be self-forgetful.

Was music once a proof of God’s existence? As long as it admits things beyond measure, That supposition stands.

How perilous is it to choose not to love the life we’re shown?

My point is there’s a hidden Scotland in anyone who speaks the Northern Ireland speech. It’s a terrific complicating factor, not just in Northern Ireland, but Ireland generally.

I’ve nothing against the Queen personally: I had lunch at the Palace once upon a time.