Top 102 Quotes by Seamus Heaney

I always believed that whatever had to be written would somehow get itself written.

The problem as you get older... is that you become more self-aware. At the same time, you have to surprise yourself. There's no way of arranging the surprise, so it is tricky.

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.

It's difficult to learn poems off by heart that don't rhyme.

A person from Northern Ireland is naturally cautious.

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

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.