I’ve been in the habit of helping people.
SEAMUS HEANEYA person from Northern Ireland is naturally cautious.
More Seamus Heaney Quotes
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In Northern Ireland, helicopters are not usually used to promote poetry.
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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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In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself.
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Poetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to it.
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The murder of Sean Brown hurt my soul.
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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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The faking of feelings is a sin against the imagination.
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I credit poetry for making this space-walk possible.
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Since I was a schoolboy, I’ve been used to being recognized on the road by old and young, and being bantered with and, indeed, being taunted.
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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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History says, ‘Don’t hope on this side of the grave.’
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I always believed that whatever had to be written would somehow get itself written.
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I don’t do as many readings as I used to. There was a time when I was on the road a lot more, at home in Ireland, in Britain, in Canada and the States, a time when I had more stamina and appetite for it.
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One doesn’t want one’s identity coerced.
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Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.
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In poetry, everything can be faked but the intensity of utterance.
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The poet is on the side of undeceiving the world.
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The amount of sensory material stored up or stored down in the brain’s and the body’s systems is inestimable. It’s like a culture at the bottom of a jar, although it doesn’t grow, I think, or help anything else to grow unless you find a way to reach it and touch it.
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If poetry and the arts do anything, they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness.
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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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My father was a creature of the archaic world, really. He would have been entirely at home in a Gaelic hill-fort. His side of the family, and the houses I associate with his side of the family, belonged to a traditional rural Ireland.
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It’s difficult to learn poems off by heart that don’t rhyme.
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My experience is that prose usually equals duty – last minute, overdue-deadline stuff or a panic lecture to be written.
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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.
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I’m a firm believer in learning by heart.
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You can have Irish identity in the north and also have your Irish passport.
SEAMUS HEANEY