History says, ‘Don’t hope on this side of the grave.’
SEAMUS HEANEYThe 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.
More Seamus Heaney Quotes
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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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The murder of Sean Brown hurt my soul.
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One doesn’t want one’s identity coerced.
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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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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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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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Anybody serious about poetry knows how hard it is to achieve anything worthwhile in it.
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Write whatever you like!
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At home in Ireland, there’s a habit of avoidance, an ironical attitude towards the authority figure.
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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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Eternal life can mean utter reverence for life itself.
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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 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 spend almost every morning with mail.
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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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Every time you read a poem aloud to yourself in the presence of others, you are reading it into yourself and them. Voice helps to carry words farther and deeper than the eye.
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Poetry is a domestic art, most itself when most at home.
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Memory has always been fundamental for me. In fact, remembering what I had forgotten is the way most of the poems get started.
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There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you.
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There’s never going to be a united Ireland, you know.
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I believe we are put here to improve civilisation.
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The fact of the matter is that the most unexpected and miraculous thing in my life was the arrival in it of poetry itself – as a vocation and an elevation almost.
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The poet is on the side of undeceiving the world.
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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’ve been in the habit of helping people.
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The faking of feelings is a sin against the imagination.
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