Seamus Heaney Quotes

Debate doesn’t really change things. It gets you bogged in deeper. If you can address or reopen the subject with something new, something from a different angle, then there is some hope. … People are suddenly gazing at something else and pausing for a moment. And for the duration of that gaze and pause, they are like reflectors of the totality of their own knowledge and/or ignorance. That’s something poetry can do for you, it can entrance you for a moment above the pool of your own consciousness and your own possibilities.

Desmond O’Grady is one of the senior figures in Irish Literary life, exemplary in the way he has committed himself over the decades to the vocation of poetry and has lived selflessly for the art

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.

Anyone with gumption and a sharp mind will take the measure of two things: what’s said and what’s done.

Believe that a further shoreis reachable from here.

If self is a location, so is love.

The whole relationship between a writer’s spiritual/emotional condition and the kind of wordstuff and form-making that’s going on in his work is an interesting one. When I was an undergraduate, there was a glib notion around that there was no reason to suppose a bad man could be a good writer.

If you have the words, there’s always a chance that you’ll find the way.

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.

My point is there’s a hidden Scotland in anyone who speaks the Northern Ireland speech. It’s a terrific complicating factor, not just in Northern Ireland, but Ireland generally.

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

On the contrary, a trust in the staying power and travel-worthiness of such good should encourage us to credit the possibility of a world where respect for the validity of every traditionwill issue in the creation and maintenance of a salubrious political space.