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1. black
2. grey
3. blue
4. red
5. brown
6. white

The poet is on the side of undeceiving the world.

Seamus Heaney

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More Seamus Heaney Quotes

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  The kinds of truth that art gives us many, many times are small truths. They don’t have the resonance of an encyclical from the Pope stating an eternal truth, but they partake of the quality of eternity. There is a sort of timeless delight in them.

  SEAMUS HEANEY
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• 

  My language and my sensibility are yearning to admit a kind of religious or transcendent dimension. But then there’s the reality: there’s no Heaven, no afterlife of the sort we were promised, and no personal God.

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• 

  Every time you read a poem aloud to yourself in the presence of others, you are reading it into yourself and them. Voice helps to carry words farther and deeper than the eye.

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• 

  It’s difficult to learn poems off by heart that don’t rhyme.

  SEAMUS HEANEY
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• 

  The group of writers I had grown up with in the ’60s – Derek Mahon, Michael Longley, James Simmons, John Hewitt, Paul Muldoon – formed a very necessary and self-sustaining group.

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• 

  Anybody serious about poetry knows how hard it is to achieve anything worthwhile in it.

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• 

  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.

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• 

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

  SEAMUS HEANEY
  CitizenshipNotePositiveReadingSinWriting
• 

  I came from a farming background, and my career was teaching.

  SEAMUS HEANEY
  CareerFarmTeaching
• 

  I’m not personally obsessed with death. At a certain age, the light that you live in is inhabited by the shades – it ’tis.

  SEAMUS HEANEY
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• 

  In the United States, in poetry workshops, it’s now quite a thing to make graduate students learn poems by heart.

  SEAMUS HEANEY
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• 

  As a young poet, you need corroboration, and that’s what publication does.

  SEAMUS HEANEY
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• 

  I spend almost every morning with mail.

  SEAMUS HEANEY
  MailMorningMyself
• 

  Tom Sleigh’s poetry is hard-earned and well founded. I great admire the way it refuses to cut emotional corners and yet achieves a sense of lyric absolution.

  SEAMUS HEANEY
  AbsoluteAdmireGreatnessLyricsPoetry
• 

  History says, ‘Don’t hope on this side of the grave.’

  SEAMUS HEANEY
  GraveHistoryHopeSide
• 

  I don’t do as many readings as I used to. There was a time when I was on the road a lot more, at home in Ireland, in Britain, in Canada and the States, a time when I had more stamina and appetite for it.

  SEAMUS HEANEY
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