I think of the bog as a feminine goddess-ridden ground, rather like the territory of Ireland itself.
SEAMUS HEANEYI always had a superstitious fear of setting up a too well-designed writing place and then finding that the writing had absconded.
More Seamus Heaney Quotes
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Eternal life can mean utter reverence for life itself.
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I came from a farming background, and my career was teaching.
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Dylan Thomas is now as much a case history as a chapter in the history of poetry.
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Poems that come swiftly are usually the ones that you keep.
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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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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 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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I suppose you could say my father’s world was Thomas Hardy and my mother’s D.H. Lawrence.
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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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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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Sonnet is about movement in a form.
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Poetry is more a threshold than a path.
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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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In my early teens, I acquired a kind of representative status: went on behalf of the family to wakes and funerals and so on. And I would be counted on as an adult contributor when it came to farm work – the hay in the summertime, for example.
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You can have Irish identity in the north and also have your Irish passport.
SEAMUS HEANEY