I think of Dermot Healy as the heir to Patrick Kavanagh.
SEAMUS HEANEYAnyone born and bred in Northern Ireland can’t be too optimistic.
More Seamus Heaney Quotes
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Poetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to it.
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There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you.
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My experience is that prose usually equals duty – last minute, overdue-deadline stuff or a panic lecture to be written.
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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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A person from Northern Ireland is naturally cautious.
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In Northern Ireland, helicopters are not usually used to promote poetry.
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If poetry and the arts do anything, they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness.
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I believe we are put here to improve civilisation.
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As writers and readers, as sinners and citizens, our realism and our aesthetic sense make us wary of crediting the positive note.
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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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Poems that come swiftly are usually the ones that you keep.
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Manifesting that order of poetry where we can at last grow up to that which we stored up as we grew.
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I think that water is immediately interesting. It’s just, as an element, it is full of life. It is associated with origin; it is bright – it reflects you.
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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.
SEAMUS HEANEY