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.
SEAMUS HEANEYI believe we are put here to improve civilisation.
More Seamus Heaney Quotes
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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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A public expectation, it has to be said, not of poetry as such but of political positions variously approvable by mutually disapproving groups.
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A person from Northern Ireland is naturally cautious.
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One doesn’t want one’s identity coerced.
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I think of Dermot Healy as the heir to Patrick Kavanagh.
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Write whatever you like!
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Eternal life can mean utter reverence for life itself.
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Poetry is what we do to break bread with the dead.
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I suppose you inevitably fall into habits of expression.
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In Northern Ireland, helicopters are not usually used to promote poetry.
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The poet is on the side of undeceiving the world.
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The fact of the matter is that the most unexpected and miraculous thing in my life was the arrival in it of poetry itself – as a vocation and an elevation almost.
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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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It’s difficult to learn poems off by heart that don’t rhyme.
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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.
SEAMUS HEANEY