The murder of Sean Brown hurt my soul.
SEAMUS HEANEYThere is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you.
More Seamus Heaney Quotes
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Eternal life can mean utter reverence for life itself.
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The gift of writing is to be self-forgetful, to get a surge of inner life or inner supply or unexpected sense of empowerment, to be afloat, to be out of yourself.
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Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.
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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.
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Anyone born and bred in Northern Ireland can’t be too optimistic.
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You can have Irish identity in the north and also have your Irish passport.
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I’ve always associated the moment of writing with a moment of lift, of joy, of unexpected reward.
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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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Poetry is what we do to break bread with the dead.
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At home in Ireland, there’s a habit of avoidance, an ironical attitude towards the authority figure.
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It’s difficult to learn poems off by heart that don’t rhyme.
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I suppose you inevitably fall into habits of expression.
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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.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
The Heaneys were aristocrats, in the sense that they took for granted a code of behavior that was given and unspoken. Argumentation, persuasion, speech itself, for God’s sake, just seemed otiose and superfluous to them.
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What I’ve said before, only half in joke, is that everybody in Ireland is famous. Or, maybe better, say everybody is familiar.
SEAMUS HEANEY