I feel myself part of something. Not only being part of a community but part of an actual moment and a movement of Irish writing and art. That sense of being part of the whole thing is the deepest joy.
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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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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Without needing to be theoretically instructed, consciousness quickly realizes that it is the site of variously contending discourses.
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In poetry, everything can be faked but the intensity of utterance.
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The group of writers I had grown up with in the ’60s – Derek Mahon, Michael Longley, James Simmons, John Hewitt, Paul Muldoon – formed a very necessary and self-sustaining group.
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Then 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.
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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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Whether it be a matter of personal relations within a marriage or political initiatives within a peace process, there is no sure-fire do-it-yourself kit.
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In a war situation or where violence and injustice are prevalent, poetry is called upon to be something more than a thing of beauty.
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I always believed that whatever had to be written would somehow get itself written.
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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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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.
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I would say that something important for me and for my generation in Northern Ireland was the 1947 Education Act, which allowed students who won scholarships to go on to secondary schools and thence to university.
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History says, ‘Don’t hope on this side of the grave.’
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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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Even if the last move did not succeed, the inner command says move again.
SEAMUS HEANEY