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The problem as you get older, is that you become more self-aware. At the same time, you have to surprise yourself. There’s no way of arranging the surprise, so it is tricky.

Seamus Heaney

A public expectation, it has to be said, not of poetry as such but of political positions variously approvable by mutually disapproving groups.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Expectation Group Poetry Position
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.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Amount Culture Growth Help Material Myself System Thinking
A person from Northern Ireland is naturally cautious.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Caution Natural Person
Poetry is a domestic art, most itself when most at home.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Art Domestic Home Poetry
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.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Expectation Nobel Ordinary Prize
In poetry, everything can be faked but the intensity of utterance.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Fake Intense Poetry Utter
One doesn’t want one’s identity coerced.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Identity Oneself
There’s never going to be a united Ireland, you know.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Country Known Unity Yourself
Manifesting that order of poetry where we can at last grow up to that which we stored up as we grew.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Grow Manifestation Order Poetry Store
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 HEANEY

Myself Old Recognition Taunt Young
It is very true to say that work done by writers is quite often an attempt to give solid expression to that which is bothering them. They feel they have got it right if they express the stress.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Expression Solid Stress True Work Writing
Poetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to it.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Mystery Poetry Relationship Slight
The poet is on the side of undeceiving the world.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Poet World
In the United States, in poetry workshops, it’s now quite a thing to make graduate students learn poems by heart.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Learning Poem Poetry Quite Student Workshop
Eternal life can mean utter reverence for life itself.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Forever Life
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.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Bright Interesting Life Myself Reflection Thinking Water

The problem as you get older, is that you become more self-aware. At the same time, you have to surprise yourself. There’s no way of arranging the surprise, so it is tricky.

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The problem as you get older, is that you become more self-aware. At the same time, you have to surprise yourself. There’s no way of arranging the surprise, so it is tricky.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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