I think of the bog as a feminine goddess-ridden ground, rather like the territory of Ireland itself.
SEAMUS HEANEYI always believed that whatever had to be written would somehow get itself written.
More Seamus Heaney Quotes
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The faking of feelings is a sin against the imagination.
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If poetry and the arts do anything, they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness.
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Write whatever you like!
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Anybody serious about poetry knows how hard it is to achieve anything worthwhile in it.
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I believe we are put here to improve civilisation.
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A person from Northern Ireland is naturally cautious.
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Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.
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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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A public expectation, it has to be said, not of poetry as such but of political positions variously approvable by mutually disapproving groups.
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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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You can have Irish identity in the north and also have your Irish passport.
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In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself.
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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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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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I’m very conscious that people dear to me are alive in my imagination – poets in particular.
SEAMUS HEANEY