Seamus Heaney

You can have Irish identity in the north and also have your Irish passport.

It is always better to avenge dear ones than to indulge in mourning. For every one of us, living in this world means waiting for our end. Let whoever can win glory before death. When a warrior is gone, that will be his best and only bulwark.

Now it’s high watermark and floodtide in the heart and time to go. The sea-nymphs in the spray will be the chorus now. What’s left to say? Suspect too much sweet-talk but never close your mind. It was a fortunate wind that blew me here. I leave half-ready to believe that a crippled trust might walk and the half-true rhyme is love.

Hope is not optimism, which expects things to turn out well, but something rooted in the conviction that there is good worth working for.

No bit of the natural world is more valuable or more vulnerable than the tree bit. Nothing is more like ourselves, standing upright, caught between heaven and earth, frail at the extremities, yet strong at the central trunk, and nothing is closer to us at the beginning and at the end, providing the timber boards that frame both the cradle and the coffin.

To begin with, I wanted that truth to life to possess a concrete reliability, and rejoiced most when the poem seemed most direct, an upfront representation of the world it stood in for or stood up for or stood its ground against.

I credit poetry for making this space-walk possible.

So hope for a great sea-change on the far side of revenge. Believe that further shore is reachable from here. Believe in miracles and cures and healing wells.

The dotted line my father's ashplant made On Sandymount Strand Is something else the tide won't wash away.

All I know is a door into the dark

History says, Don’t hope On this side of the grave, But then, once in a lifetime The longed-for tidal wave Of justice can rise up, And hope and history rhyme

If you have the words, there's always a chance that you'll find the way.

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

I suppose I'm saying that defiance is actually part of the lyric job

Walk on air against your better judgement.

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.

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

Poetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to it.

I've always associated the moment of writing with a moment of lift, of joy, of unexpected reward.