I suppose you inevitably fall into habits of expression.
SEAMUS HEANEYThe murder of Sean Brown hurt my soul.
More Seamus Heaney Quotes
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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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At home in Ireland, there’s a habit of avoidance, an ironical attitude towards the authority figure.
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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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The experiment of poetry, as far as I am concerned, happens when the poem carries you beyond where you could have reasonably expected to go.
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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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The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.
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The group of writers I had grown up with in the ’60s – Derek Mahon, Michael Longley, James Simmons, John Hewitt, Paul Muldoon – formed a very necessary and self-sustaining group.
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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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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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Even if the last move did not succeed, the inner command says move again.
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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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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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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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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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History says, ‘Don’t hope on this side of the grave.’
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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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Nowadays, what an award gives is a sense of solidarity with the poetry guild, as it were: sustenance coming from the assent of your peers on the judging panel.
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Poetry is a domestic art, most itself when most at home.
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The poet is on the side of undeceiving the world.
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Anybody serious about poetry knows how hard it is to achieve anything worthwhile in it.
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One doesn’t want one’s identity coerced.
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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’ve always associated the moment of writing with a moment of lift, of joy, of unexpected reward.
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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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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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Write whatever you like!
SEAMUS HEANEY