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.
SEAMUS HEANEYIf poetry and the arts do anything, they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness.
More Seamus Heaney Quotes
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We go to poetry, we go to literature in general, to be forwarded within ourselves.
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Poems that come swiftly are usually the ones that you keep.
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My father was a creature of the archaic world, really. He would have been entirely at home in a Gaelic hill-fort. His side of the family, and the houses I associate with his side of the family, belonged to a traditional rural Ireland.
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I think that water is immediately interesting. It’s just, as an element, it is full of life. It is associated with origin; it is bright – it reflects you.
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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 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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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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The end of art is peace.
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You can have Irish identity in the north and also have your Irish passport.
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If poetry and the arts do anything, they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness.
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Anybody serious about poetry knows how hard it is to achieve anything worthwhile in it.
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It’s difficult to learn poems off by heart that don’t rhyme.
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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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I’m a firm believer in learning by heart.
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Without needing to be theoretically instructed, consciousness quickly realizes that it is the site of variously contending discourses.
SEAMUS HEANEY