I’m very conscious that people dear to me are alive in my imagination – poets in particular.
SEAMUS HEANEYIn the United States, in poetry workshops, it’s now quite a thing to make graduate students learn poems by heart.
More Seamus Heaney Quotes
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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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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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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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Eternal life can mean utter reverence for life itself.
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My father and mother had no sense of entitlement for their children.
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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.
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I suppose you could say my father’s world was Thomas Hardy and my mother’s D.H. Lawrence.
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I think childhood is, generally speaking, a preparation for disappointment.
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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.
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Sonnet is about movement in a form.
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I spend almost every morning with mail.
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There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you.
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In my early teens, I acquired a kind of representative status: went on behalf of the family to wakes and funerals and so on. And I would be counted on as an adult contributor when it came to farm work – the hay in the summertime, for example.
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Dylan Thomas is now as much a case history as a chapter in the history of poetry.
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I always believed that whatever had to be written would somehow get itself written.
SEAMUS HEANEY