Quotes from Seamus Heaney

At a certain age, the light that you live in is inhabited by the shades…I'm very conscious that people dear to me are alive in my imagination…These people are with me. It's just a stage of your life when the death of people doesn't banish them out of your consciousness, They're part of the light in your head.

Then I thought of the tribe whose dances never fail / For they keep dancing till they sight the deer.

People so staunch and true, they're fixated, Shining with self-regard like polished stones. And their whole life spent admiring themselves For their own long-suffering. Licking their wounds And flashing them around like decorations. I hate it, I always hated it, and I am A part of it myself.

You carried your own burden and very soon your symptoms of creeping privilege disappeared.

Rain comes down through the alders, Its low conductive voices Mutter about let-downs and erosions And yet each drop recalls The diamond absolutes.

He sits, strong and blunt as a Celtic cross, Clearly used to silence and an armchair: Tonight the wife and children will be quiet At slammed door and smoker's cough in the hall.

As writers and readers, as sinners and citizens, our realism and our aesthetic sense make us wary of crediting the positive note. The very gunfire braces us and the atrocious confers a worth upon the effort which it calls forth to confront it.

Only the very stupid or the very deprived can any longer help knowing that the documents of civilization have been written in blood and tears, blood and tears no less real for being very remote.

Be the necklace-fire of stars, The cauterizing lightning. Bewilder us with good.

Is there life before death? That's chalked up In Ballymurphy. Competence with pain, Coherent miseries, a bite and a sup, We hug our little destiny again.

The form of the poem, in other words, is crucial to poetry's power to do the thing which always is and always will be to poetry's credit: the power to persuade that vulnerable part of our consciousness of its rightness in spite of the evidence of wrongness all around it, the power to remind us that we are hunters and gatherers of values, that our very solitudes and distresses are creditable, in so far as they, too, are an earnest of our veritable human being.

To work, her dumb lunge says, is to move a certain mass ...through a certain distance, is to pull your weight and feel exact and equal to it. Feel dragged upon. And buoyant.

You lose more of yourself than you redeem doing the decent thing. Keep at a tangent When they make the circle wide, it's time to swim Out on your own and fill the element with signatures on your own frequency.

I cannot be weaned/Off the earth's long contour, her river-veins.

Whether it be a matter of personal relations within a marriage or political initiatives within a peace process, there is no sure-fire do-it-yourself kit.

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.

Wyrd oft nered unfaegne, eorl, ponne his ellen deah. Often, for undaunted courage, fate spares the man it has not already marked.

Sometimes at pagan shrines they vowed offerings to idols, swore oaths that the killer of souls might come to their aid and save the people. That was their way, their heathenish hope; deep in their hearts they remembered hell.

Let whoever can win glory before death.

All of us would like to have been born Infallible, but since we knew we weren't, It's better to attend to those who speak In honesty and good faith, and learn from them.

peace is merely the desolation left behind after the decisive operations of merciless power.

My body was braille for the creeping influences.

For every one of us, living in this world means waiting for our end.

Islanders too are for sculpting.