263 Quotes by Seamus Heaney

As writers and readers, as sinners and citizens, our realism and our aesthetic sense make us wary of crediting the positive note. The very gunfire braces us and the atrocious confers a worth upon the effort which it calls forth to confront it.

The fact of the matter is that the most unexpected and miraculous thing in my life was the arrival in it of poetry itself – as a vocation and an elevation almost.

I’ve always associated the moment of writing with a moment of lift, of joy, of unexpected reward.

A populace that is chloroformed day and night by TV stations like Fox News could do with inoculation by poetry. Obviously, poetry can’t be administered like an injection, but it does constitute a boost to the capacity for discrimination and resistance.

But every now and then, just weighing in is what it must come down to, and without any self-exculpation or self-pity.

The bogholes might be Atlantic seepage. The wet centre is bottomless.

I suppose I’m saying that defiance is actually part of the lyric job.

The dotted line my father’s ashplant made On Sandymount Strand Is something else the tide won’t wash away.

I can’t think of a case where poems changed the world, but what they do is they change people’s understanding of what’s going on in the world.