Quote

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

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
Changed
Understanding
Change
Going
Think
Thinking
Poems
World
Case
People
Cases

More quotes by Seamus Heaney

Image
Strange, it is a huge nothing that we fear.
Seamus Heaney
Image
A public expectation, it has to be said, not of poetry as such but of political positions variously approvable by mutually disapproving groups.
Seamus Heaney
Image
If you have the words, there's always a chance that you'll find the way.
Seamus Heaney
Image
Walk on air against your better judgement.
Seamus Heaney
Image
Two buckets were easier carried than one. / I grew up in between.
Seamus Heaney
Image
I've always associated the moment of writing with a moment of lift, of joy, of unexpected reward.
Seamus Heaney
Image
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.
Seamus Heaney
Image
But even so, none of the news of these world-spasms entered me as terror.
Seamus Heaney
Image
I shall gain glory or die.
Seamus Heaney
Image
Believe that a further shore is reachable from here.
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
I have always thought of poems as stepping stones in one's own sense of oneself.
Seamus Heaney
Image
Then as the years went on and my listening became more deliberate, I would climb up on an arm of our big sofa to get my ear closer to the wireless speaker.
Seamus Heaney
Image
I am not a playwright. A playwright would take Antigone and hit it a few clouts and knock it out of shape and restructure it. My versioning was strictly verbal.
Seamus Heaney
Image
Yet there are times when a deeper need enters, when we want the poem to be not only pleasurably right but compellingly wise, not only a surprising variation played upon the world, but a re-tuning of the world itself.
Seamus Heaney
Image
The dotted line my father's ashplant made On Sandymount Strand Is something else the tide won't wash away.
Seamus Heaney
Image
The way we are living, timorous or bold, will have been our life.
Seamus Heaney
Image
Even if the last move did not succeed, the inner command says move again.
Seamus Heaney
Image
In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself.
Seamus Heaney
Image
I always believed that whatever had to be written would somehow get itself written.
Seamus Heaney