Seamus Heaney Quotes

"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.

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.

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

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

Fate goes ever as fate must.

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.

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

And a young prince must be prudent like that,
giving freely while his father lives
so that afterwards, in age when fighting starts
steadfast companions will stand by him
and hold the line.

It is difficult at times to repress the thought that history is about as instructive as an abattoir; that Tacitus was right and that peace is merely the desolation left behind after the decisive operations of merciless power.

Meanwhile, the sword
began to wilt into gory icicles,
to slather and thaw. It was a wonderful thing,
the way it all melted as ice melts
when the Father eases the fetters off the frost
and unravels the water-ropes. He who wields power
over time and tide: He is the true Lord.