I feel myself part of something. Not only being part of a community but part of an actual moment and a movement of Irish writing and art. That sense of being part of the whole thing is the deepest joy.
SEAMUS HEANEYHistory says, ‘Don’t hope on this side of the grave.’
More Seamus Heaney Quotes
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The end of art is peace.
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I always had a superstitious fear of setting up a too well-designed writing place and then finding that the writing had absconded.
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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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Poems that come swiftly are usually the ones that you keep.
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I think of the bog as a feminine goddess-ridden ground, rather like the territory of Ireland itself.
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I’ve always associated the moment of writing with a moment of lift, of joy, of unexpected reward.
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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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I suppose you inevitably fall into habits of expression.
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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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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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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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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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In a way, Anglo-Saxon poetry cannot be translated.
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Eternal life can mean utter reverence for life itself.
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In a war situation or where violence and injustice are prevalent, poetry is called upon to be something more than a thing of beauty.
SEAMUS HEANEY