Seamus Heaney Quotes - Page 5

I've nothing against the Queen personally: I had lunch at the Palace once upon a time.

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.

But that citizen's perception was also at one with the truth in recognizing that the very brutality of the means by which the IRA were pursuing change was destructive of the trust upon which new possibilities would have to be based.

Harvard meant a lot in my writing life from the beginning, even though I didnt actually do much composition on the spot.

Hope for a great sea-change timid to rebuke and too petty to forgive.

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.

The bogholes might be Atlantic seepage. The wet centre is bottomless.

The appointment [in Harvard] gave me economic safety, writerly support, and intellectual self-respectplus eight months to myself every year.

Once I was on the job, once I had got started, I felt safe enough, but the anticipation made me tense.

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.

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.

In off the moors, down through the mist beams, god-cursed Grendel came greedily loping.

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.