There’s never going to be a united Ireland, you know.
SEAMUS HEANEYAnybody serious about poetry knows how hard it is to achieve anything worthwhile in it.
More Seamus Heaney Quotes
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You can have Irish identity in the north and also have your Irish passport.
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I think childhood is, generally speaking, a preparation for disappointment.
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Every time you read a poem aloud to yourself in the presence of others, you are reading it into yourself and them. Voice helps to carry words farther and deeper than the eye.
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The faking of feelings is a sin against the imagination.
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One doesn’t want one’s identity coerced.
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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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In my early teens, I acquired a kind of representative status: went on behalf of the family to wakes and funerals and so on. And I would be counted on as an adult contributor when it came to farm work – the hay in the summertime, for example.
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Poems that come swiftly are usually the ones that you keep.
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I always believed that whatever had to be written would somehow get itself written.
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It’s difficult to learn poems off by heart that don’t rhyme.
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We go to poetry, we go to literature in general, to be forwarded within ourselves.
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I think the first little jolt I got was reading Gerard Manley Hopkins – I liked other poems… but Hopkins was kind of electric for me – he changed the rules with speech, and the whole intensity of the language was there and so on.
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The problem as you get older, is that you become more self-aware. At the same time, you have to surprise yourself. There’s no way of arranging the surprise, so it is tricky.
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History says, ‘Don’t hope on this side of the grave.’
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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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