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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.

Seamus Heaney

What I’ve said before, only half in joke, is that everybody in Ireland is famous. Or, maybe better, say everybody is familiar.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Better Famous Myself Talk
I’ve been in the habit of helping people.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Habit Help Myself People
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 HEANEY

Big Listening Myself Speaker
The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Help Imagination Myself
I have begun to think of life as a series of ripples widening out from an original center.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Beginning Life Myself Thinking Wide
In the United States, in poetry workshops, it’s now quite a thing to make graduate students learn poems by heart.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Learning Poem Poetry Quite Student Workshop
In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Fact Lyrics Medium Poetry Recognition Truth
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.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Academy Foundation Mindset Myself Name
You can have Irish identity in the north and also have your Irish passport.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Identify Passport Yourself
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 HEANEY

Death Light Myself Obsession Personally
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.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Expectation Experiment Myself Poetry Reason
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.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Arrangement Aware Old Problem Trick
History says, ‘Don’t hope on this side of the grave.’
SEAMUS HEANEY

Grave History Hope Side
Manifesting that order of poetry where we can at last grow up to that which we stored up as we grew.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Grow Manifestation Order Poetry Store
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.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Empowerment Expectation Forget Gift Writing Yourself
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.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Argument Aristocrats Behavior God Talk

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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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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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