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 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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I always believed that whatever had to be written would somehow get itself written.
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The murder of Sean Brown hurt my soul.
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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 think of the bog as a feminine goddess-ridden ground, rather like the territory of Ireland itself.
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The problem as you get older, is that you become more self-aware. At the same time, you have to surprise yourself. There’s no way of arranging the surprise, so it is tricky.
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Even if the last move did not succeed, the inner command says move again.
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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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I’ve been in the habit of helping people.
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The end of art is peace.
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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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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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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 language and my sensibility are yearning to admit a kind of religious or transcendent dimension. But then there’s the reality: there’s no Heaven, no afterlife of the sort we were promised, and no personal God.
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Poetry is a domestic art, most itself when most at home.
SEAMUS HEANEY