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.
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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There’s never going to be a united Ireland, you know.
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I’ve been in the habit of helping people.
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In poetry, everything can be faked but the intensity of utterance.
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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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If you go into an underground train in London – probably anywhere, but chiefly in London – there’s that sense of almost entering a ghostly dimension. People are very still and quiet; they don’t exchange many pleasantries.
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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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I always believed that whatever had to be written would somehow get itself written.
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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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I have begun to think of life as a series of ripples widening out from an original center.
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Poems that come swiftly are usually the ones that you keep.
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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.
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I think childhood is, generally speaking, a preparation for disappointment.
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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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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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Sonnet is about movement in a form.
SEAMUS HEANEY