The fact of the matter is that the most unexpected and miraculous thing in my life was the arrival in it of poetry itself – as a vocation and an elevation almost.
SEAMUS HEANEYThen as the years went on and my listening became more deliberate, I would climb up on an arm of our big sofa to get my ear closer to the wireless speaker.
More Seamus Heaney Quotes
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There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you.
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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.
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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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Without needing to be theoretically instructed, consciousness quickly realizes that it is the site of variously contending discourses.
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There’s never going to be a united Ireland, you know.
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I think childhood is, generally speaking, a preparation for disappointment.
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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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Anybody serious about poetry knows how hard it is to achieve anything worthwhile in it.
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The end of art is peace.
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Poetry is what we do to break bread with the dead.
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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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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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Write whatever you like!
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Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.
SEAMUS HEANEY