Seamus Heaney

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

— Seamus Heaney

Is there life before death? That’s chalked up

— Seamus Heaney

Between my finger and my thumb

— Seamus Heaney

I feel myself part of something. Not only being part of a community but part of an actual moment and a movement of Irish writing and art. That sense of being part of the whole thing is the deepest joy.

— Seamus Heaney

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.

— Seamus Heaney

In a war situation or where violence and injustice are prevalent, poetry is called upon to be something more than a thing of beauty.

— Seamus Heaney

If you have the words, there's always a chance that you'll find the way.

— Seamus Heaney

The way we are living,

— Seamus Heaney

All I know is a door into the dark

— Seamus Heaney

I rhyme

— Seamus Heaney

I have begun to think of life as a series of ripples widening out from an original center.

— Seamus Heaney

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

— Seamus Heaney

Let whoever can win glory before death.

— Seamus Heaney

Since when," he asked,

— Seamus Heaney

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

— Seamus Heaney

I want away to the house of death, to my father under the low, clay roof.

— Seamus Heaney

It is always better

— Seamus Heaney

Postscript

— Seamus Heaney

There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you.

— Seamus Heaney

History says, Don’t hope

— Seamus Heaney

I spend almost every morning with mail.

— Seamus Heaney

I'm not personally obsessed with death. At a certain age, the light that you live in is inhabited by the shades - it 'tis.

— Seamus Heaney

I would say that something important for me and for my generation in Northern Ireland was the 1947 Education Act, which allowed students who won scholarships to go on to secondary schools and thence to university.

— Seamus Heaney

The faking of feelings is a sin against the imagination.

— Seamus Heaney

Is there life before death? That’s chalked up

— Seamus Heaney

Whether it be a matter of personal relations within a marriage or political initiatives within a peace process, there is no sure-fire do-it-yourself kit.

— Seamus Heaney

I have always thought of poems as stepping stones in one's own sense of oneself. Every now and again, you write a poem that gives you self-respect and steadies your going a little bit farther out in the stream. At the same time, you have to conjure the next stepping stone because the stream, we hope, keeps flowing.

— Seamus Heaney