I feel myself part of something. Not only being part of a community but part of an actual moment and a movement of Irish writing and art. That sense of being part of the whole thing is the deepest joy.
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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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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The faking of feelings is a sin against the imagination.
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Tom Sleigh’s poetry is hard-earned and well founded. I great admire the way it refuses to cut emotional corners and yet achieves a sense of lyric absolution.
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Anyone born and bred in Northern Ireland can’t be too optimistic.
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Poetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to it.
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I’ve always associated the moment of writing with a moment of lift, of joy, of unexpected reward.
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The kind of poet who founds and reconstitutes values is somebody like Yeats or Whitman – these are public value-founders.
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Your temperament is what you write with, but it’s also how you deal with the world.
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The gift of writing is to be self-forgetful, to get a surge of inner life or inner supply or unexpected sense of empowerment, to be afloat, to be out of yourself.
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I’m not personally obsessed with death. At a certain age, the light that you live in is inhabited by the shades – it ’tis.
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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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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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There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you.
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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 murder of Sean Brown hurt my soul.
SEAMUS HEANEY