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.
SEAMUS HEANEYI’ve always associated the moment of writing with a moment of lift, of joy, of unexpected reward.
More Seamus Heaney Quotes
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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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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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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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In the United States, in poetry workshops, it’s now quite a thing to make graduate students learn poems by heart.
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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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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 have begun to think of life as a series of ripples widening out from an original center.
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I suppose you inevitably fall into habits of expression.
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I’ve been in the habit of helping people.
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The poet is on the side of undeceiving the world.
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The experimental poetry thing is not my thing. It’s a programme of the avant-garde: basically a refusal of the kind of poetry I write.
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Anyone born and bred in Northern Ireland can’t be too optimistic.
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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 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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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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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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I think of Dermot Healy as the heir to Patrick Kavanagh.
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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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The problem as you get older, is that you become more self-aware. At the same time, you have to surprise yourself. There’s no way of arranging the surprise, so it is tricky.
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A person from Northern Ireland is naturally cautious.
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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 spend almost every morning with mail.
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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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Poetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to it.
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The Heaneys were aristocrats, in the sense that they took for granted a code of behavior that was given and unspoken. Argumentation, persuasion, speech itself, for God’s sake, just seemed otiose and superfluous to them.
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The murder of Sean Brown hurt my soul.
SEAMUS HEANEY