History says, ‘Don’t hope on this side of the grave.’
SEAMUS HEANEYThe poet is on the side of undeceiving the world.
More Seamus Heaney Quotes
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If poetry and the arts do anything, they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness.
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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.
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My experience is that prose usually equals duty – last minute, overdue-deadline stuff or a panic lecture to be written.
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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.
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I’m very conscious that people dear to me are alive in my imagination – poets in particular.
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You can have Irish identity in the north and also have your Irish passport.
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Poems that come swiftly are usually the ones that you keep.
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In poetry, everything can be faked but the intensity of utterance.
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Nowadays, what an award gives is a sense of solidarity with the poetry guild, as it were: sustenance coming from the assent of your peers on the judging panel.
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It is very true to say that work done by writers is quite often an attempt to give solid expression to that which is bothering them. They feel they have got it right if they express the stress.
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Write whatever you like!
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The amount of sensory material stored up or stored down in the brain’s and the body’s systems is inestimable. It’s like a culture at the bottom of a jar, although it doesn’t grow, I think, or help anything else to grow unless you find a way to reach it and touch it.
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One doesn’t want one’s identity coerced.
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Since I was a schoolboy, I’ve been used to being recognized on the road by old and young, and being bantered with and, indeed, being taunted.
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Loyalism, or Unionism, or Protestantism, or whatever you want to call it, in Northern Ireland – it operates not as a class system, but a caste system.
SEAMUS HEANEY