Top 102 Quotes by Seamus Heaney

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

I think childhood is, generally speaking, a preparation for disappointment.

At home in Ireland, there's a habit of avoidance, an ironical attitude towards the authority figure.

Without needing to be theoretically instructed, consciousness quickly realizes that it is the site of variously contending discourses.

My passport's green.

Yeats was 18th-century oratory, almost.

I'm a firm believer in learning by heart.

I always believed that whatever had to be written would somehow get itself written.

Dylan Thomas is now as much a case history as a chapter in the history of poetry.

The faking of feelings is a sin against the imagination.