Top 102 Quotes by Seamus Heaney

There's never going to be a united Ireland, you know.

Poems that come swiftly are usually the ones that you keep.

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

My father and mother had no sense of entitlement for their children.

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

You yourself don't have to be shaken by mortal danger in order to feel your mortality.

I believe we are put here to improve civilisation.

I've said it before about the Nobel Prize: it's like being struck by a more or less benign avalanche. It was unexpected, unlooked for, and extraordinary.

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.

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