My father and mother had no sense of entitlement for their children.
SEAMUS HEANEYI 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.
More Seamus Heaney Quotes
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Even if the last move did not succeed, the inner command says move again.
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Tom Sleigh’s poetry is hard-earned and well founded. I great admire the way it refuses to cut emotional corners and yet achieves a sense of lyric absolution.
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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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I have begun to think of life as a series of ripples widening out from an original center.
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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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I always believed that whatever had to be written would somehow get itself written.
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Nowadays, what an award gives is a sense of solidarity with the poetry guild, as it were: sustenance coming from the assent of your peers on the judging panel.
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Poems that come swiftly are usually the ones that you keep.
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I credit poetry for making this space-walk possible.
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It is very true to say that work done by writers is quite often an attempt to give solid expression to that which is bothering them. They feel they have got it right if they express the stress.
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The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.
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Memory has always been fundamental for me. In fact, remembering what I had forgotten is the way most of the poems get started.
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The kinds of truth that art gives us many, many times are small truths. They don’t have the resonance of an encyclical from the Pope stating an eternal truth, but they partake of the quality of eternity. There is a sort of timeless delight in them.
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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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You yourself don’t have to be shaken by mortal danger in order to feel your mortality.
SEAMUS HEANEY