Anyone born and bred in Northern Ireland can’t be too optimistic.
SEAMUS HEANEYI believe we are put here to improve civilisation.
More Seamus Heaney Quotes
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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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In my early teens, I acquired a kind of representative status: went on behalf of the family to wakes and funerals and so on. And I would be counted on as an adult contributor when it came to farm work – the hay in the summertime, for example.
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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 person from Northern Ireland is naturally cautious.
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I always believed that whatever had to be written would somehow get itself written.
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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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My father and mother had no sense of entitlement for their children.
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Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.
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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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I suppose you could say my father’s world was Thomas Hardy and my mother’s D.H. Lawrence.
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Poetry is what we do to break bread with the dead.
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Eternal life can mean utter reverence for life itself.
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I’m very conscious that people dear to me are alive in my imagination – poets in particular.
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In a war situation or where violence and injustice are prevalent, poetry is called upon to be something more than a thing of beauty.
SEAMUS HEANEY