Seamus Heaney

“I came from a farming background, and my career was teaching.”

“My passport's green.”

“Sink every impulse like a bolt. Secure The bastion of sensation. Do not waver Into language. Do not waver in it.”

“Poetry is what we do to break bread with the dead.”

“There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you.”

“To encounter 'Beowulf' is like taking a sledgehammer to a quarry face. You must bang in there.”

“I think of Dermot Healy as the heir to Patrick Kavanagh.”

“I suppose you inevitably fall into habits of expression.”

“A person from Northern Ireland is naturally cautious.”

“If poetry and the arts do anything, they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness.”

“The kind of poet who founds and reconstitutes values is somebody like Yeats or Whitman - these are public value-founders.”

“Poetry is more a threshold than a path.”

“Manifesting that order of poetry where we can at last grow up to that which we stored up as we grew.”

“My father and mother had no sense of entitlement for their children.”

“Whether it be a matter of personal relations within a marriage or political initiatives within a peace process, there is no sure-fire do-it-yourself kit.”

“Anybody serious about poetry knows how hard it is to achieve anything worthwhile in it.”

“Believe that a further shore is reachable from here.”

“Sonnet is about movement in a form.”

“In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself.”

“I think the first little jolt I got was reading Gerard Manley Hopkins - I liked other poems... but Hopkins was kind of electric for me - he changed the rules with speech, and the whole intensity of the language was there and so on.”