I spend almost every morning with mail.
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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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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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.
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History says, ‘Don’t hope on this side of the grave.’
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Since I was a schoolboy, I’ve been used to being recognized on the road by old and young, and being bantered with and, indeed, being taunted.
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Your temperament is what you write with, but it’s also how you deal with the world.
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When I first encountered the name of the city of Stockholm, I little thought that I would ever visit it, never mind end up being welcomed to it as a guest of the Swedish Academy and the Nobel Foundation.
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Poetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to it.
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It’s difficult to learn poems off by heart that don’t rhyme.
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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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I’m very conscious that people dear to me are alive in my imagination – poets in particular.
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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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Even if the last move did not succeed, the inner command says move again.
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My father and mother had no sense of entitlement for their children.
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I’m a firm believer in learning by heart.
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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.
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