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 HEANEYPoems that come swiftly are usually the ones that you keep.
More Seamus Heaney Quotes
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I think of Dermot Healy as the heir to Patrick Kavanagh.
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I always believed that whatever had to be written would somehow get itself written.
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Nowadays, what an award gives is a sense of solidarity with the poetry guild, as it were: sustenance coming from the assent of your peers on the judging panel.
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Poetry is a domestic art, most itself when most at home.
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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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Without needing to be theoretically instructed, consciousness quickly realizes that it is the site of variously contending discourses.
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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’ve been in the habit of helping people.
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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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At home in Ireland, there’s a habit of avoidance, an ironical attitude towards the authority figure.
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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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Loyalism, or Unionism, or Protestantism, or whatever you want to call it, in Northern Ireland – it operates not as a class system, but a caste system.
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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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Anyone born and bred in Northern Ireland can’t be too optimistic.
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I think the first little jolt I got was reading Gerard Manley Hopkins – I liked other poems… but Hopkins was kind of electric for me – he changed the rules with speech, and the whole intensity of the language was there and so on.
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Memory has always been fundamental for me. In fact, remembering what I had forgotten is the way most of the poems get started.
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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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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’m a firm believer in learning by heart.
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Manifesting that order of poetry where we can at last grow up to that which we stored up as we grew.
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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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My father and mother had no sense of entitlement for their children.
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Poetry is more a threshold than a path.
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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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Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.
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