I have begun to think of life as a series of ripples widening out from an original center.
SEAMUS HEANEYDylan Thomas is now as much a case history as a chapter in the history of poetry.
More Seamus Heaney Quotes
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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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Poems that come swiftly are usually the ones that you keep.
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In Northern Ireland, helicopters are not usually used to promote poetry.
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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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Sonnet is about movement in a form.
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I’m very conscious that people dear to me are alive in my imagination – poets in particular.
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I suppose you inevitably fall into habits of expression.
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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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I credit poetry for making this space-walk possible.
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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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Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.
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History says, ‘Don’t hope on this side of the grave.’
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It’s difficult to learn poems off by heart that don’t rhyme.
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One of the best descriptions of the type of writer I am was given by Tom Paulin, who described himself as a ‘binge’ writer – like a binge drinker. I go on binges.
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Anybody serious about poetry knows how hard it is to achieve anything worthwhile in it.
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Your temperament is what you write with, but it’s also how you deal with the world.
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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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My experience is that prose usually equals duty – last minute, overdue-deadline stuff or a panic lecture to be written.
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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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In my early teens, I acquired a kind of representative status: went on behalf of the family to wakes and funerals and so on. And I would be counted on as an adult contributor when it came to farm work – the hay in the summertime, for example.
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Poetry is more a threshold than a path.
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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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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 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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I’ve always associated the moment of writing with a moment of lift, of joy, of unexpected reward.
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My father and mother had no sense of entitlement for their children.
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