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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.

Seamus Heaney

Anybody serious about poetry knows how hard it is to achieve anything worthwhile in it.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Achievement Hard Poetry Serious Worth
Even if the last move did not succeed, the inner command says move again.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Command Move Success
I’m a firm believer in learning by heart.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Believe Heart Learning
When I first encountered the name of the city of Stockholm, I little thought that I would ever visit it, never mind end up being welcomed to it as a guest of the Swedish Academy and the Nobel Foundation.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Academy Foundation Mindset Myself Name
I always believed that whatever had to be written would somehow get itself written.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Believe Myself Writing
You yourself don’t have to be shaken by mortal danger in order to feel your mortality.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Dangerous Feeling Mortal Order Yourself
We go to poetry, we go to literature in general, to be forwarded within ourselves.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Literature Ourselves Poetry
I don’t think my intelligence is naturally analytic or political.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Intelligence Natural Politics Thinking
The end of art is peace.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Art End One Liner Peace
My father and mother had no sense of entitlement for their children.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Children Father Mom Myself
At home in Ireland, there’s a habit of avoidance, an ironical attitude towards the authority figure.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Attitude Authority Avoid Figure Habit Home
In Northern Ireland, helicopters are not usually used to promote poetry.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Poetry Promotion
Poetry is a domestic art, most itself when most at home.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Art Domestic Home Poetry
In poetry, everything can be faked but the intensity of utterance.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Fake Intense Poetry Utter
I spend almost every morning with mail.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Mail Morning Myself
What I’ve said before, only half in joke, is that everybody in Ireland is famous. Or, maybe better, say everybody is familiar.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Better Famous Myself Talk
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 HEANEY

Associate Creature Family Father Traditional World
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
History says, ‘Don’t hope on this side of the grave.’
SEAMUS HEANEY

Grave History Hope Side
Poetry is more a threshold than a path.
SEAMUS HEANEY

One Liner Path Poetry
The completely solitary self: that’s where poetry comes from, and it gets isolated by crisis, and those crises are often very intimate also.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Complete Crisis Intimate Isolation Poetry
I have begun to think of life as a series of ripples widening out from an original center.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Beginning Life Myself Thinking Wide
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.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Brutal Change Citizenship Destruction Perception Possible Pursue Recognition
The Heaneys were aristocrats, in the sense that they took for granted a code of behavior that was given and unspoken. Argumentation, persuasion, speech itself, for God’s sake, just seemed otiose and superfluous to them.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Argument Aristocrats Behavior God Talk
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.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Complication Factor Myself Point Talk
The poet is on the side of undeceiving the world.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Poet World
The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Help Imagination Myself

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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What I’ve said before, only half in joke, is that everybody in Ireland is famous. Or, maybe better, say everybody is familiar.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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