Seamus Heaney Quotes & Sayings

“Loyalism, or Unionism, or Protestantism, or whatever you want to call it, in Northern Ireland - it operates not as a class system, but a caste system.”

“I have begun to think of life as a series of ripples widening out from an original center.”

“Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.”

“I have always thought of poems as stepping stones in one's own sense of oneself. Every now and again, you write a poem that gives you self-respect and steadies your going a little bit farther out in the stream. At the same time, you have to conjure the next stepping stone because the stream, we hope, keeps flowing.”

“If poetry and the arts do anything, they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness.”

“Memory has always been fundamental for me. In fact, remembering what I had forgotten is the way most of the poems get started.”

“The fact of the matter is that the most unexpected and miraculous thing in my life was the arrival in it of poetry itself - as a vocation and an elevation almost.”

“Poetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to it.”

“I'm a firm believer in learning by heart.”

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