I suppose you could say my father’s world was Thomas Hardy and my mother’s D.H. Lawrence.
SEAMUS HEANEYI’ve said it before about the Nobel Prize: it’s like being struck by a more or less benign avalanche. It was unexpected, unlooked for, and extraordinary.
More Seamus Heaney Quotes
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Poetry is a domestic art, most itself when most at home.
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We go to poetry, we go to literature in general, to be forwarded within ourselves.
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My father was a creature of the archaic world, really. He would have been entirely at home in a Gaelic hill-fort. His side of the family, and the houses I associate with his side of the family, belonged to a traditional rural Ireland.
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Poetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to it.
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A person from Northern Ireland is naturally cautious.
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The murder of Sean Brown hurt my soul.
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I’m a firm believer in learning by heart.
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I came from a farming background, and my career was teaching.
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In the United States, in poetry workshops, it’s now quite a thing to make graduate students learn poems by heart.
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History says, ‘Don’t hope on this side of the grave.’
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I always believed that whatever had to be written would somehow get itself written.
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The kind of poet who founds and reconstitutes values is somebody like Yeats or Whitman – these are public value-founders.
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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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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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Without needing to be theoretically instructed, consciousness quickly realizes that it is the site of variously contending discourses.
SEAMUS HEANEY