My father and mother had no sense of entitlement for their children.
SEAMUS HEANEYEven if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.
More Seamus Heaney Quotes
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I came from a farming background, and my career was teaching.
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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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I credit poetry for making this space-walk possible.
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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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We go to poetry, we go to literature in general, to be forwarded within ourselves.
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My language and my sensibility are yearning to admit a kind of religious or transcendent dimension. But then there’s the reality: there’s no Heaven, no afterlife of the sort we were promised, and no personal God.
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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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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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I don’t think my intelligence is naturally analytic or political.
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Anyone born and bred in Northern Ireland can’t be too optimistic.
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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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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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Poetry is more a threshold than a path.
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In Northern Ireland, helicopters are not usually used to promote poetry.
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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 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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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.
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History says, ‘Don’t hope on this side of the grave.’
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Poetry is a domestic art, most itself when most at home.
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I spend almost every morning with mail.
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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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You yourself don’t have to be shaken by mortal danger in order to feel your mortality.
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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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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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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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A public expectation, it has to be said, not of poetry as such but of political positions variously approvable by mutually disapproving groups.
SEAMUS HEANEY