One doesn’t want one’s identity coerced.
SEAMUS HEANEYThere is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you.
More Seamus Heaney Quotes
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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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I came from a farming background, and my career was teaching.
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The poet is on the side of undeceiving the world.
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Poetry is a domestic art, most itself when most at home.
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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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You can have Irish identity in the north and also have your Irish passport.
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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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Dylan Thomas is now as much a case history as a chapter in the history of poetry.
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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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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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Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.
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In poetry, everything can be faked but the intensity of utterance.
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As a young poet, you need corroboration, and that’s what publication does.
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I’ve been in the habit of helping people.
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You yourself don’t have to be shaken by mortal danger in order to feel your mortality.
SEAMUS HEANEY