Top 102 Quotes by Seamus Heaney

I'm a firm believer in learning by heart.

We go to poetry, we go to literature in general, to be forwarded within ourselves.

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

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

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.

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.

The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.

My experience is that prose usually equals duty - last minute, overdue-deadline stuff or a panic lecture to be written.

If poetry and the arts do anything, they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness.

Memory has always been fundamental for me. In fact, remembering what I had forgotten is the way most of the poems get started.