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.
SEAMUS HEANEYI suppose you inevitably fall into habits of expression.
More Seamus Heaney Quotes
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In poetry, everything can be faked but the intensity of utterance.
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Eternal life can mean utter reverence for life itself.
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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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I think childhood is, generally speaking, a preparation for disappointment.
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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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In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself.
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Every time you read a poem aloud to yourself in the presence of others, you are reading it into yourself and them. Voice helps to carry words farther and deeper than the eye.
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The experimental poetry thing is not my thing. It’s a programme of the avant-garde: basically a refusal of the kind of poetry I write.
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The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.
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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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My experience is that prose usually equals duty – last minute, overdue-deadline stuff or a panic lecture to be written.
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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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I’m very conscious that people dear to me are alive in my imagination – poets in particular.
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If you go into an underground train in London – probably anywhere, but chiefly in London – there’s that sense of almost entering a ghostly dimension. People are very still and quiet; they don’t exchange many pleasantries.
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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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I spend almost every morning with mail.
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I credit poetry for making this space-walk possible.
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In Northern Ireland, helicopters are not usually used to promote poetry.
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In the United States, in poetry workshops, it’s now quite a thing to make graduate students learn poems by heart.
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My language and my sensibility are yearning to admit a kind of religious or transcendent dimension. But then there’s the reality: there’s no Heaven, no afterlife of the sort we were promised, and no personal God.
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I think of Dermot Healy as the heir to Patrick Kavanagh.
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The faking of feelings is a sin against the imagination.
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My point is there’s a hidden Scotland in anyone who speaks the Northern Ireland speech. It’s a terrific complicating factor, not just in Northern Ireland, but Ireland generally.
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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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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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I don’t think my intelligence is naturally analytic or political.
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