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.
SEAMUS HEANEYSonnet is about movement in a form.
More Seamus Heaney Quotes
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Then as the years went on and my listening became more deliberate, I would climb up on an arm of our big sofa to get my ear closer to the wireless speaker.
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In poetry, everything can be faked but the intensity of utterance.
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Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.
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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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Poetry is what we do to break bread with the dead.
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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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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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Poetry is more a threshold than a path.
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Dylan Thomas is now as much a case history as a chapter in the history of poetry.
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I don’t think my intelligence is naturally analytic or political.
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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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Sonnet is about movement in a form.
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I credit poetry for making this space-walk possible.
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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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It is very true to say that work done by writers is quite often an attempt to give solid expression to that which is bothering them. They feel they have got it right if they express the stress.
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I believe we are put here to improve civilisation.
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I think of the bog as a feminine goddess-ridden ground, rather like the territory of Ireland itself.
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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 group of writers I had grown up with in the ’60s – Derek Mahon, Michael Longley, James Simmons, John Hewitt, Paul Muldoon – formed a very necessary and self-sustaining group.
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The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.
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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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The kind of poet who founds and reconstitutes values is somebody like Yeats or Whitman – these are public value-founders.
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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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I feel myself part of something. Not only being part of a community but part of an actual moment and a movement of Irish writing and art. That sense of being part of the whole thing is the deepest joy.
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I spend almost every morning with mail.
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I think childhood is, generally speaking, a preparation for disappointment.
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