Quotes from Seamus Heaney

A person from Northern Ireland is naturally cautious.

The Heaneys were aristocrats, in the sense that they took for granted a code of behavior that was given and unspoken. Argumentation, persuasion, speech itself, for God's sake, just seemed otiose and superfluous to them.

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.

Anyone born and bred in Northern Ireland can't be too optimistic.

Yeats was 18th-century oratory, almost.

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

God is a foreman with certain definite views Who orders life in shifts of work and leisure.

Even if the last move did not succeed, the inner command says move again.

Peter Robinson

I spend almost every morning with mail.

Hope for a great sea-change timid to rebuke and too petty to forgive.