I’ve been in the habit of helping people.
SEAMUS HEANEYThere is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you.
More Seamus Heaney Quotes
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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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It’s difficult to learn poems off by heart that don’t rhyme.
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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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I came from a farming background, and my career was teaching.
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A public expectation, it has to be said, not of poetry as such but of political positions variously approvable by mutually disapproving groups.
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Poems that come swiftly are usually the ones that you keep.
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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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I’m very conscious that people dear to me are alive in my imagination – poets in particular.
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History says, ‘Don’t hope on this side of the grave.’
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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.
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Loyalism, or Unionism, or Protestantism, or whatever you want to call it, in Northern Ireland – it operates not as a class system, but a caste system.
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Poetry is a domestic art, most itself when most at home.
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The amount of sensory material stored up or stored down in the brain’s and the body’s systems is inestimable. It’s like a culture at the bottom of a jar, although it doesn’t grow, I think, or help anything else to grow unless you find a way to reach it and touch it.
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A person from Northern Ireland is naturally cautious.
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In poetry, everything can be faked but the intensity of utterance.
SEAMUS HEANEY