As writers and readers, as sinners and citizens, our realism and our aesthetic sense make us wary of crediting the positive note.
SEAMUS HEANEYMemory has always been fundamental for me. In fact, remembering what I had forgotten is the way most of the poems get started.
More Seamus Heaney Quotes
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The experimental poetry thing is not my thing. It’s a programme of the avant-garde: basically a refusal of the kind of poetry I write.
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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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What I’ve said before, only half in joke, is that everybody in Ireland is famous. Or, maybe better, say everybody is familiar.
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As a young poet, you need corroboration, and that’s what publication does.
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Sonnet is about movement in a form.
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I don’t think my intelligence is naturally analytic or political.
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Anybody serious about poetry knows how hard it is to achieve anything worthwhile in it.
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One of the best descriptions of the type of writer I am was given by Tom Paulin, who described himself as a ‘binge’ writer – like a binge drinker. I go on binges.
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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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I suppose you inevitably fall into habits of expression.
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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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Poetry is more a threshold than a path.
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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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Even if the last move did not succeed, the inner command says move again.
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History says, ‘Don’t hope on this side of the grave.’
SEAMUS HEANEY