You can have Irish identity in the north and also have your Irish passport.
SEAMUS HEANEYThe poet is on the side of undeceiving the world.
More Seamus Heaney Quotes
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In a way, Anglo-Saxon poetry cannot be translated.
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History says, ‘Don’t hope on this side of the grave.’
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I think of Dermot Healy as the heir to Patrick Kavanagh.
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I came from a farming background, and my career was teaching.
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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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Your temperament is what you write with, but it’s also how you deal with the world.
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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.
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I don’t think my intelligence is naturally analytic or political.
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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.
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The Heaneys were aristocrats, in the sense that they took for granted a code of behavior that was given and unspoken. Argumentation, persuasion, speech itself, for God’s sake, just seemed otiose and superfluous to them.
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There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you.
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Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.
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The experiment of poetry, as far as I am concerned, happens when the poem carries you beyond where you could have reasonably expected to go.
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A person from Northern Ireland is naturally cautious.
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Manifesting that order of poetry where we can at last grow up to that which we stored up as we grew.
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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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I suppose you inevitably fall into habits of expression.
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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.
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Dylan Thomas is now as much a case history as a chapter in the history of poetry.
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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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My point is there’s a hidden Scotland in anyone who speaks the Northern Ireland speech. It’s a terrific complicating factor, not just in Northern Ireland, but Ireland generally.
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I’ve always associated the moment of writing with a moment of lift, of joy, of unexpected reward.
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I think childhood is, generally speaking, a preparation for disappointment.
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My father and mother had no sense of entitlement for their children.
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In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself.
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Eternal life can mean utter reverence for life itself.
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