In poetry, everything can be faked but the intensity of utterance.
SEAMUS HEANEYI suppose you inevitably fall into habits of expression.
More Seamus Heaney Quotes
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Anybody serious about poetry knows how hard it is to achieve anything worthwhile in it.
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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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Write whatever you like!
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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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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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I’ve been in the habit of helping people.
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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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I 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.
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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 believe we are put here to improve civilisation.
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I’ve always associated the moment of writing with a moment of lift, of joy, of unexpected reward.
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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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There’s never going to be a united Ireland, you know.
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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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I spend almost every morning with mail.
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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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If poetry and the arts do anything, they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness.
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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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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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Poetry is a domestic art, most itself when most at home.
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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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Poetry is what we do to break bread with the dead.
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Poems that come swiftly are usually the ones that you keep.
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A person from Northern Ireland is naturally cautious.
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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 kind of poet who founds and reconstitutes values is somebody like Yeats or Whitman – these are public value-founders.
SEAMUS HEANEY