Seamus Heaney citations

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

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

“Human beings suffer,
they torture one another,
they get hurt and get hard.”

“Call the miracle self-healing:
The utter self-revealing
double-take of feeling.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“History says don't hope
On this side of the grave.
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up
And hope and history rhyme.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“So hope for a great sea-change
On the far side of revenge.
Believe that further shore
Is reachable from here.
Believe in miracles
And cures and healing wells.”

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

“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.”

“I shall gain glory or die.”

“The writing of certain poems (eg 'The Guttural Muse and others)took me to the bottom of myself, something inchoate but troubled, you might say I had muddied the waters, but I felt these poems arrived from an older, deeper, cleaner spring.”

“The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I've no spade to follow men like them.
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I'll dig with it.”

“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.”

“Don't be surprised if I demur, for, be advised
My passport's green.
No glass of ours was ever raised
To toast The Queen.”

“My poetry journey into the wilderness of language was a journey where each point of arrival turned out to be a stepping stone rather than a destination.”

“I don't mean sound as decoration or elaboration, but the actual cadence that moves tge thing along.”

“Don't be afraid.”
Noli timere.