Poetry is more a threshold than a path.
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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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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My point is there’s a hidden Scotland in anyone who speaks the Northern Ireland speech. It’s a terrific complicating factor, not just in Northern Ireland, but Ireland generally.
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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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History says, ‘Don’t hope on this side of the grave.’
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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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There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you.
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The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.
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In a way, Anglo-Saxon poetry cannot be translated.
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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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I don’t think my intelligence is naturally analytic or political.
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I’m a firm believer in learning by heart.
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Write whatever you like!
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I’m not personally obsessed with death. At a certain age, the light that you live in is inhabited by the shades – it ’tis.
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Loyalism, or Unionism, or Protestantism, or whatever you want to call it, in Northern Ireland – it operates not as a class system, but a caste system.
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Nowadays, what an award gives is a sense of solidarity with the poetry guild, as it were: sustenance coming from the assent of your peers on the judging panel.
SEAMUS HEANEY