Top 102 Quotes by Seamus Heaney

Manifesting that order of poetry where we can at last grow up to that which we stored up as we grew.

Anybody serious about poetry knows how hard it is to achieve anything worthwhile in it.

A public expectation, it has to be said, not of poetry as such but of political positions variously approvable by mutually disapproving groups.

Eternal life can mean utter reverence for life itself.

Every time you read a poem aloud to yourself in the presence of others, you are reading it into yourself and them. Voice helps to carry words farther and deeper than the eye.

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

Poetry is what we do to break bread with the dead.

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.

The completely solitary self: that's where poetry comes from, and it gets isolated by crisis, and those crises are often very intimate also.

History says, 'Don't hope on this side of the grave.'