A biography for Seamus Heaneyhasn’t been written yet.
“I would say that something important for me and for my generation in Northern Ireland was the 1947 Education Act, which allowed students who won scholarships to go on to secondary schools and thence to university.”
“I believe we are put here to improve civilisation.”
“I've always associated the moment of writing with a moment of lift, of joy, of unexpected reward.”
“Since I was a schoolboy, I've been used to being recognized on the road by old and young, and being bantered with and, indeed, being taunted.”
“The way we are living,timorous or bold,will have been our life.”
“In a way, Anglo-Saxon poetry cannot be translated.”
“Poetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to it.”
“The murder of Sean Brown hurt my soul.”
“I feel myself part of something. Not only being part of a community but part of an actual moment and a movement of Irish writing and art. That sense of being part of the whole thing is the deepest joy.”
“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.”
“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.”
“words...To lure the tribal shoals to epigram / And order.”
“I suppose I'm saying that defiance is actually part of the lyric job”
“At home in Ireland, there's a habit of avoidance, an ironical attitude towards the authority figure.”
“I think of the bog as a feminine goddess-ridden ground, rather like the territory of Ireland itself.”
“Dylan Thomas is now as much a case history as a chapter in the history of poetry.”
“He sits, strong and blunt as a Celtic cross, Clearly used to silence and an armchair: Tonight the wife and children will be quiet At slammed door and smoker's cough in the hall.”
“In my early teens, I acquired a kind of representative status: went on behalf of the family to wakes and funerals and so on. And I would be counted on as an adult contributor when it came to farm work - the hay in the summertime, for example.”
“The Heaneys were aristocrats, in the sense that they took for granted a code of behavior that was given and unspoken. Argumentation, persuasion, speech itself, for God's sake, just seemed otiose and superfluous to them.”
“I've said it before about the Nobel Prize: it's like being struck by a more or less benign avalanche. It was unexpected, unlooked for, and extraordinary.”