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.
SEAMUS HEANEYThe 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.
More Seamus Heaney Quotes
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I have begun to think of life as a series of ripples widening out from an original center.
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My father and mother had no sense of entitlement for their children.
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Anybody serious about poetry knows how hard it is to achieve anything worthwhile in it.
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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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A person from Northern Ireland is naturally cautious.
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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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We go to poetry, we go to literature in general, to be forwarded within ourselves.
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My father was a creature of the archaic world, really. He would have been entirely at home in a Gaelic hill-fort. His side of the family, and the houses I associate with his side of the family, belonged to a traditional rural Ireland.
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What I’ve said before, only half in joke, is that everybody in Ireland is famous. Or, maybe better, say everybody is familiar.
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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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I think of Dermot Healy as the heir to Patrick Kavanagh.
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I’ve been in the habit of helping people.
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It’s difficult to learn poems off by heart that don’t rhyme.
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I would say that something important for me and for my generation in Northern Ireland was the 1947 Education Act, which allowed students who won scholarships to go on to secondary schools and thence to university.
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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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