I think of the bog as a feminine goddess-ridden ground, rather like the territory of Ireland itself.
SEAMUS HEANEYI think of Dermot Healy as the heir to Patrick Kavanagh.
More Seamus Heaney Quotes
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Anyone born and bred in Northern Ireland can’t be too optimistic.
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I credit poetry for making this space-walk possible.
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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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Eternal life can mean utter reverence for life itself.
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The end of art is peace.
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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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Without needing to be theoretically instructed, consciousness quickly realizes that it is the site of variously contending discourses.
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One doesn’t want one’s identity coerced.
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There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you.
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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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I have begun to think of life as a series of ripples widening out from an original center.
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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 believe we are put here to improve civilisation.
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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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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.
SEAMUS HEANEY