The faking of feelings is a sin against the imagination.
SEAMUS HEANEYIn poetry, everything can be faked but the intensity of utterance.
More Seamus Heaney Quotes
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Poetry is more a threshold than a path.
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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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Anybody serious about poetry knows how hard it is to achieve anything worthwhile in it.
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We go to poetry, we go to literature in general, to be forwarded within ourselves.
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I don’t think my intelligence is naturally analytic or political.
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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 came from a farming background, and my career was teaching.
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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 believe we are put here to improve civilisation.
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Poetry is a domestic art, most itself when most at home.
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Without needing to be theoretically instructed, consciousness quickly realizes that it is the site of variously contending discourses.
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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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At home in Ireland, there’s a habit of avoidance, an ironical attitude towards the authority figure.
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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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Poems that come swiftly are usually the ones that you keep.
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The kinds of truth that art gives us many, many times are small truths. They don’t have the resonance of an encyclical from the Pope stating an eternal truth, but they partake of the quality of eternity. There is a sort of timeless delight in them.
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Write whatever you like!
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It’s difficult to learn poems off by heart that don’t rhyme.
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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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In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself.
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History says, ‘Don’t hope on this side of the grave.’
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My father and mother had no sense of entitlement for their children.
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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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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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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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I think that water is immediately interesting. It’s just, as an element, it is full of life. It is associated with origin; it is bright – it reflects you.
SEAMUS HEANEY