I’m not personally obsessed with death. At a certain age, the light that you live in is inhabited by the shades – it ’tis.
SEAMUS HEANEYThe Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.
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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A person from Northern Ireland is naturally cautious.
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I always believed that whatever had to be written would somehow get itself written.
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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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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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There’s never going to be a united Ireland, you know.
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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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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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The faking of feelings is a sin against the imagination.
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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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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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There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you.
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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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I suppose you could say my father’s world was Thomas Hardy and my mother’s D.H. Lawrence.
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You can have Irish identity in the north and also have your Irish passport.
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Anyone born and bred in Northern Ireland can’t be too optimistic.
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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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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 have begun to think of life as a series of ripples widening out from an original center.
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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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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 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.
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A public expectation, it has to be said, not of poetry as such but of political positions variously approvable by mutually disapproving groups.
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I credit poetry for making this space-walk possible.
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Anybody serious about poetry knows how hard it is to achieve anything worthwhile in it.
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