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.
SEAMUS HEANEYWhat I’ve said before, only half in joke, is that everybody in Ireland is famous. Or, maybe better, say everybody is familiar.
More Seamus Heaney Quotes
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When I first encountered the name of the city of Stockholm, I little thought that I would ever visit it, never mind end up being welcomed to it as a guest of the Swedish Academy and the Nobel Foundation.
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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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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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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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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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In Northern Ireland, helicopters are not usually used to promote poetry.
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If poetry and the arts do anything, they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness.
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Poetry is more a threshold than a path.
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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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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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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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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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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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Anyone born and bred in Northern Ireland can’t be too optimistic.
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Poetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to it.
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We go to poetry, we go to literature in general, to be forwarded within ourselves.
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One doesn’t want one’s identity coerced.
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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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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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Tom Sleigh’s poetry is hard-earned and well founded. I great admire the way it refuses to cut emotional corners and yet achieves a sense of lyric absolution.
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I always had a superstitious fear of setting up a too well-designed writing place and then finding that the writing had absconded.
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There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you.
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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.
SEAMUS HEANEY