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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.

Seamus Heaney

I’ve been in the habit of helping people.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Habit Help Myself People
It’s difficult to learn poems off by heart that don’t rhyme.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Difficult Heart Learning Rhyme
In the United States, in poetry workshops, it’s now quite a thing to make graduate students learn poems by heart.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Learning Poem Poetry Quite Student Workshop
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.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Amount Culture Growth Help Material Myself System Thinking
You yourself don’t have to be shaken by mortal danger in order to feel your mortality.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Dangerous Feeling Mortal Order Yourself
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.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Group Necessary Sustainable Writing
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.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Expectation Nobel Ordinary Prize
History says, ‘Don’t hope on this side of the grave.’
SEAMUS HEANEY

Grave History Hope Side
Poetry is a domestic art, most itself when most at home.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Art Domestic Home Poetry
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.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Caste Loyalty Operation Religion System
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.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Bright Interesting Life Myself Reflection Thinking Water
The murder of Sean Brown hurt my soul.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Hurt Murder Myself Soul
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.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Intense Language Myself Poem Reading Talk Thinking
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.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Marriage Peace Personal Politics
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.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Dimension Ghost People Pleasant Quiet Training Yourself
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.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Home Myself Reading Time

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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Memory has always been fundamental for me. In fact, remembering what I had forgotten is the way most of the poems get started.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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