Quotes from Seamus Heaney

Nothing's secure. Gold's only lead When you stop to think. On your way up, show consideration To the ones you meet on their way down. The Latin root of 'condescension' Means we all sink.

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

It is always better to avenge dear ones than to indulge in mourning. For every one of us, living in this world means waiting for our end. Let whoever can win glory before death. When a warrior is gone, that will be his best and only bulwark.

Walk on air against your better judgement.

Behaviour that's admired is the path to power among people everywhere.

Anyone with gumption and a sharp mind will take the measure of two things: what's said and what's done.

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.

All I know is a door into the dark

The end of art is peace.

Between my finger and my thumb The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.

If self is a location, so is love: Bearings taken, markings, cardinal points, Options, obstinacies, dug heels, and distance, Here and there and now and then, a stance.

I rhyme To see myself, to set the darkness echoing.

Now it's high watermark and floodtide in the heart and time to go. The sea-nymphs in the spray will be the chorus now. What's left to say? Suspect too much sweet-talk but never close your mind. It was a fortunate wind that blew me here. I leave half-ready to believe that a crippled trust might walk and the half-true rhyme is love.

I shall gain glory or die.

Since when," he asked, "Are the first line and last line of any poem Where the poem begins and ends?

The way we are living, timorous or bold, will have been our life.

The main thing is to write for the joy of it. Cultivate a work-lust that imagines its haven like your hands at night dreaming the sun in the sunspot of a breast. You are fasted now, light-headed, dangerous. Take off from here.

That was their way, their heathenish hope; deep in their hearts they remembered hell.

Strange, it is a huge nothing that we fear.

Sink every impulse like a bolt. Secure The bastion of sensation. Do not waver Into language. Do not waver in it.

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

Be advised my passport's green. No glass of ours was ever raised to toast the Queen.

The aim of poetry and the poet is finally to be of service, to ply the effort of the individual into the larger work of the community as a whole.

In off the moors, down through the mist beams, god-cursed Grendel came greedily loping.