In poetry, everything can be faked but the intensity of utterance.
SEAMUS HEANEYPoetry is more a threshold than a path.
More Seamus Heaney Quotes
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But that citizen’s perception was also at one with the truth in recognizing that the very brutality of the means by which the IRA were pursuing change was destructive of the trust upon which new possibilities would have to be based.
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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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There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you.
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We go to poetry, we go to literature in general, to be forwarded within ourselves.
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I always had a superstitious fear of setting up a too well-designed writing place and then finding that the writing had absconded.
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I’m a firm believer in learning by heart.
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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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I credit poetry for making this space-walk possible.
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The end of art is peace.
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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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Dylan Thomas is now as much a case history as a chapter in the history of poetry.
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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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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.
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I think childhood is, generally speaking, a preparation for disappointment.
SEAMUS HEANEY