I suppose you inevitably fall into habits of expression.
SEAMUS HEANEYI 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.
More Seamus Heaney Quotes
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In my early teens, I acquired a kind of representative status: went on behalf of the family to wakes and funerals and so on. And I would be counted on as an adult contributor when it came to farm work – the hay in the summertime, for example.
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The kind of poet who founds and reconstitutes values is somebody like Yeats or Whitman – these are public value-founders.
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I’m a firm believer in learning by heart.
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A person from Northern Ireland is naturally cautious.
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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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One doesn’t want one’s identity coerced.
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Without needing to be theoretically instructed, consciousness quickly realizes that it is the site of variously contending discourses.
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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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My father and mother had no sense of entitlement for their children.
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The end of art is peace.
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I’m not personally obsessed with death. At a certain age, the light that you live in is inhabited by the shades – it ’tis.
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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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I came from a farming background, and my career was teaching.
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I’ve said it before about the Nobel Prize: it’s like being struck by a more or less benign avalanche. It was unexpected, unlooked for, and extraordinary.
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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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The faking of feelings is a sin against the imagination.
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What I’ve said before, only half in joke, is that everybody in Ireland is famous. Or, maybe better, say everybody is familiar.
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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 think childhood is, generally speaking, a preparation for disappointment.
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Poems that come swiftly are usually the ones that you keep.
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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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Poetry is what we do to break bread with the dead.
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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 always believed that whatever had to be written would somehow get itself written.
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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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I spend almost every morning with mail.
SEAMUS HEANEY