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 HEANEYI don’t think my intelligence is naturally analytic or political.
More Seamus Heaney Quotes
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I suppose you could say my father’s world was Thomas Hardy and my mother’s D.H. Lawrence.
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I believe we are put here to improve civilisation.
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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.
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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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If you go into an underground train in London – probably anywhere, but chiefly in London – there’s that sense of almost entering a ghostly dimension. People are very still and quiet; they don’t exchange many pleasantries.
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I always believed that whatever had to be written would somehow get itself written.
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I think the first little jolt I got was reading Gerard Manley Hopkins – I liked other poems… but Hopkins was kind of electric for me – he changed the rules with speech, and the whole intensity of the language was there and so on.
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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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I’m a firm believer in learning by heart.
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The experimental poetry thing is not my thing. It’s a programme of the avant-garde: basically a refusal of the kind of poetry I write.
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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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Whether it be a matter of personal relations within a marriage or political initiatives within a peace process, there is no sure-fire do-it-yourself kit.
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One of the best descriptions of the type of writer I am was given by Tom Paulin, who described himself as a ‘binge’ writer – like a binge drinker. I go on binges.
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I have begun to think of life as a series of ripples widening out from an original center.
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The gift of writing is to be self-forgetful, to get a surge of inner life or inner supply or unexpected sense of empowerment, to be afloat, to be out of yourself.
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You yourself don’t have to be shaken by mortal danger in order to feel your mortality.
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I always had a superstitious fear of setting up a too well-designed writing place and then finding that the writing had absconded.
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I suppose you inevitably fall into habits of expression.
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The completely solitary self: that’s where poetry comes from, and it gets isolated by crisis, and those crises are often very intimate also.
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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 Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.
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I think of Dermot Healy as the heir to Patrick Kavanagh.
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I credit poetry for making this space-walk possible.
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One doesn’t want one’s identity coerced.
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The problem as you get older, is that you become more self-aware. At the same time, you have to surprise yourself. There’s no way of arranging the surprise, so it is tricky.
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The end of art is peace.
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