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
World
Case
People
Cases
Changed
Understanding
Change
Going
Think
Thinking
Poems

More quotes by Seamus Heaney

Image
If you have the words, there's always a chance that you'll find the way.
Seamus Heaney
Image
Allow ourselves to do as Ram Dass said in his delicious phrase Be Here Now. If you are here now you cannot fall into falsely constructed gender projections.
Seamus Heaney
Image
At home in Ireland, there's a habit of avoidance, an ironical attitude towards the authority figure.
Seamus Heaney
Image
Walk on air against your better judgement.
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
I drink to keep body and soul apart.
Seamus Heaney
Image
Nowadays, what an award gives is a sense of solidarity with the poetry guild, as it were: sustenance coming from the assent of your peers on the judging panel.
Seamus Heaney
Image
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.
Seamus Heaney
Image
I rhyme… to see myself, to set the darkness echoing.
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
Between my finger and my thumb The squat pen rests snug as a gun. ~from the poem Digging
Seamus Heaney
Image
The next move is always the test.
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
Now it’s high watermark and floodtide in the heart and time to go. The sea-nymphs in the spray will be the chorus now. What’s left to say? Suspect too much sweet-talk but never close your mind. It was a fortunate wind that blew me here. I leave half-ready to believe that a crippled trust might walk and the half-true rhyme is love.
Seamus Heaney
Image
Suspect too much sweet talk but never close your mind.
Seamus Heaney
Image
I have always thought of poems as stepping stones in one's own sense of oneself.
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
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
I suppose I did feel a certain public pressure always.
Seamus Heaney
Image
I always believed that whatever had to be written would somehow get itself written.
Seamus Heaney