In Northern Ireland, helicopters are not usually used to promote poetry.
SEAMUS HEANEYI 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.
More Seamus Heaney Quotes
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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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I have begun to think of life as a series of ripples widening out from an original center.
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Nowadays, what an award gives is a sense of solidarity with the poetry guild, as it were: sustenance coming from the assent of your peers on the judging panel.
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When I first encountered the name of the city of Stockholm, I little thought that I would ever visit it, never mind end up being welcomed to it as a guest of the Swedish Academy and the Nobel Foundation.
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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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If poetry and the arts do anything, they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness.
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You yourself don’t have to be shaken by mortal danger in order to feel your mortality.
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There’s never going to be a united Ireland, you know.
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It is very true to say that work done by writers is quite often an attempt to give solid expression to that which is bothering them. They feel they have got it right if they express the stress.
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The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.
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The experiment of poetry, as far as I am concerned, happens when the poem carries you beyond where you could have reasonably expected to go.
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I spend almost every morning with mail.
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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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Poetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to it.
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We go to poetry, we go to literature in general, to be forwarded within ourselves.
SEAMUS HEANEY