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.
SEAMUS HEANEYI’ve been in the habit of helping people.
More Seamus Heaney Quotes
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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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Poetry is more a threshold than a path.
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One doesn’t want one’s identity coerced.
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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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Since I was a schoolboy, I’ve been used to being recognized on the road by old and young, and being bantered with and, indeed, being taunted.
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As writers and readers, as sinners and citizens, our realism and our aesthetic sense make us wary of crediting the positive note.
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I don’t think my intelligence is naturally analytic or political.
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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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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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At home in Ireland, there’s a habit of avoidance, an ironical attitude towards the authority figure.
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Without needing to be theoretically instructed, consciousness quickly realizes that it is the site of variously contending discourses.
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As a young poet, you need corroboration, and that’s what publication does.
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Poetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to it.
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Sonnet is about movement in a form.
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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.
SEAMUS HEANEY