Quotations by Author

Seamus Heaney

As writers and readers, as sinners and citizens, our realism and our aesthetic sense make us wary of crediting the positive note.

It has as much to do with the energy released by linguistic fission and fusion, with the buoyancy generated by cadence and tone and rhyme and stanza, as it has to do with the poem's concerns or the poet's truthfulness.

It was like a moment of exposure to interstellar cold, a reminder of the scary element, both inner and outer, in which human beings must envisage and conduct their lives.

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

Yet there are times when a deeper need enters, when we want the poem to be not only pleasurably right but compellingly wise, not only a surprising variation played upon the world, but a re-tuning of the world itself.