I believe we are put here to improve civilisation.
SEAMUS HEANEYAt home in Ireland, there’s a habit of avoidance, an ironical attitude towards the authority figure.
More Seamus Heaney Quotes
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The poet is on the side of undeceiving the world.
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In a way, Anglo-Saxon poetry cannot be translated.
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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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Poetry is more a threshold than a path.
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If poetry and the arts do anything, they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness.
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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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In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself.
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I have begun to think of life as a series of ripples widening out from an original center.
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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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Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.
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I’m a firm believer in learning by heart.
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I spend almost every morning with mail.
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I suppose you could say my father’s world was Thomas Hardy and my mother’s D.H. Lawrence.
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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.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.
SEAMUS HEANEY