Quote

I always believed that whatever had to be written would somehow get itself written.

Seamus Heaney

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Seamus Heaney
Age: 74 †
Born: 1939
Born: April 13
Died: 2013
Died: August 30
Actor
Author
Linguist
Playwright
Poet
Translator
University Teacher
Writer
Seamus Justin Heaney
Seamus Heaney
Always
Would
Believed
Somehow
Written
Whatever

More quotes by Seamus Heaney

Image
Sink every impulse like a bolt. Secure The bastion of sensation. Do not waver Into language. Do not waver in it.
Seamus Heaney
Image
If you have the words, there's always a chance that you'll find the way.
Seamus Heaney
Image
Harvard created wonderful conditions for me as a writerbut the writing was done, almost entirely, when I got home.
Seamus Heaney
Image
Behaviour that's admired is the path to power among people everywhere.
Seamus Heaney
Image
The next move is always the test.
Seamus Heaney
Image
At home in Ireland, there's a habit of avoidance, an ironical attitude towards the authority figure.
Seamus Heaney
Image
Best to say that once a poem is finished I trust it to make its way, and I trust readers will find their way to it and through it, if the thing has got itself rightly expressed.
Seamus Heaney
Image
Once off the bush The fruit fermented, the sweet flesh would turn sour. I always felt like crying. It wasn't fair That all the lovely canfuls smelt of rot. Each year I hoped they'd keep, knew they would not. -Blackberry picking
Seamus Heaney
Image
I have always thought of poems as stepping stones in one's own sense of oneself.
Seamus Heaney
Image
Believe that a further shore is reachable from here.
Seamus Heaney
Image
Memory has always been fundamental for me. In fact, remembering what I had forgotten is the way most of the poems get started.
Seamus Heaney
Image
I rhyme… to see myself, to set the darkness echoing.
Seamus Heaney
Image
When I first encountered the name of the city of Stockholm, I little thought that I would ever visit it, never mind end up being welcomed to it as a guest of the Swedish Academy and the Nobel Foundation.
Seamus Heaney
Image
The end of art is peace.
Seamus Heaney
Image
The completely solitary self: that's where poetry comes from, and it gets isolated by crisis, and those crises are often very intimate also.
Seamus Heaney
Image
I have begun to think of life as a series of ripples widening out from an original center.
Seamus Heaney
Image
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.
Seamus Heaney
Image
Irish readers, British readers, American readers: is it odd that I haven't a clue about how differently they react? Or better say, I cannot find the words to describe my hunch about them.
Seamus Heaney
Image
Poetry is language in orbit.
Seamus Heaney
Image
Once I was on the job, once I had got started, I felt safe enough, but the anticipation made me tense.
Seamus Heaney