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.
SEAMUS HEANEYI 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.
More Seamus Heaney Quotes
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The amount of sensory material stored up or stored down in the brain’s and the body’s systems is inestimable. It’s like a culture at the bottom of a jar, although it doesn’t grow, I think, or help anything else to grow unless you find a way to reach it and touch it.
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As a young poet, you need corroboration, and that’s what publication does.
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The faking of feelings is a sin against the imagination.
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History says, ‘Don’t hope on this side of the grave.’
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The end of art is peace.
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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.
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Loyalism, or Unionism, or Protestantism, or whatever you want to call it, in Northern Ireland – it operates not as a class system, but a caste system.
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You yourself don’t have to be shaken by mortal danger in order to feel your mortality.
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The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.
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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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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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Poetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to it.
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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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The poet is on the side of undeceiving the world.
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Write whatever you like!
SEAMUS HEANEY