I think of Dermot Healy as the heir to Patrick Kavanagh.
SEAMUS HEANEYAs writers and readers, as sinners and citizens, our realism and our aesthetic sense make us wary of crediting the positive note.
More Seamus Heaney Quotes
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My father was a creature of the archaic world, really. He would have been entirely at home in a Gaelic hill-fort. His side of the family, and the houses I associate with his side of the family, belonged to a traditional rural Ireland.
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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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In poetry, everything can be faked but the intensity of utterance.
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Poetry is more a threshold than a path.
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Anybody serious about poetry knows how hard it is to achieve anything worthwhile in it.
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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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Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.
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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 murder of Sean Brown hurt my soul.
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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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My experience is that prose usually equals duty – last minute, overdue-deadline stuff or a panic lecture to be written.
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Anyone born and bred in Northern Ireland can’t be too optimistic.
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History says, ‘Don’t hope on this side of the grave.’
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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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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 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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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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Poetry is a domestic art, most itself when most at home.
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The faking of feelings is a sin against the imagination.
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Poems that come swiftly are usually the ones that you keep.
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I came from a farming background, and my career was teaching.
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There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you.
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In a war situation or where violence and injustice are prevalent, poetry is called upon to be something more than a thing of beauty.
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A person from Northern Ireland is naturally cautious.
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I credit poetry for making this space-walk possible.
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There’s never going to be a united Ireland, you know.
SEAMUS HEANEY