Poetry is more a threshold than a path.
SEAMUS HEANEYThe poet is on the side of undeceiving the world.
More Seamus Heaney Quotes
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Poetry is a domestic art, most itself when most at home.
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I came from a farming background, and my career was teaching.
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The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.
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Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.
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There’s never going to be a united Ireland, you know.
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I believe we are put here to improve civilisation.
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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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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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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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One doesn’t want one’s identity coerced.
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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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In a war situation or where violence and injustice are prevalent, poetry is called upon to be something more than a thing of beauty.
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In Northern Ireland, helicopters are not usually used to promote poetry.
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The end of art is peace.
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What I’ve said before, only half in joke, is that everybody in Ireland is famous. Or, maybe better, say everybody is familiar.
SEAMUS HEANEY