I think childhood is, generally speaking, a preparation for disappointment.
SEAMUS HEANEYThe experiment of poetry, as far as I am concerned, happens when the poem carries you beyond where you could have reasonably expected to go.
More Seamus Heaney Quotes
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Poetry is more a threshold than a path.
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My father and mother had no sense of entitlement for their children.
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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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If poetry and the arts do anything, they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness.
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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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I’ve said it before about the Nobel Prize: it’s like being struck by a more or less benign avalanche. It was unexpected, unlooked for, and extraordinary.
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Eternal life can mean utter reverence for life itself.
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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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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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I suppose you inevitably fall into habits of expression.
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I credit poetry for making this space-walk possible.
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A person from Northern Ireland is naturally cautious.
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My language and my sensibility are yearning to admit a kind of religious or transcendent dimension. But then there’s the reality: there’s no Heaven, no afterlife of the sort we were promised, and no personal God.
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In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself.
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The Heaneys were aristocrats, in the sense that they took for granted a code of behavior that was given and unspoken. Argumentation, persuasion, speech itself, for God’s sake, just seemed otiose and superfluous to them.
SEAMUS HEANEY