Seamus Heaney Quotes

The Nobel is just another prize; it changes something but it doesn’t change your being the way your first writing does.

She taught me what her uncle once taught her: How easily the biggest coal block split If you got the grain and hammer angled right. The sound of that relaxed alluring blow, Its co-opted and obliterated echo, Taught me to hit, taught me to loosen, Taught me between the hammer and the block To face the music. Teach me now to listen, To strike it rich behind the linear black.

Their embassies, he said, were everywhere but operated independently and no ambassador would ever be relieved.

When I landed in the republic of conscience it was so noiseless when the engines stopped I could hear a curlew high above the runway.

The riverbed, dried-up, half full of leaves. Us, listening to a river in the trees.