Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.
SEAMUS HEANEYOne of the best descriptions of the type of writer I am was given by Tom Paulin, who described himself as a ‘binge’ writer – like a binge drinker. I go on binges.
More Seamus Heaney Quotes
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The end of art is peace.
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The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.
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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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The poet is on the side of undeceiving the world.
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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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Manifesting that order of poetry where we can at last grow up to that which we stored up as we grew.
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In a way, Anglo-Saxon poetry cannot be translated.
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I think childhood is, generally speaking, a preparation for disappointment.
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In Northern Ireland, helicopters are not usually used to promote poetry.
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One doesn’t want one’s identity coerced.
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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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Poetry is more a threshold than a path.
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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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I suppose you inevitably fall into habits of expression.
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The faking of feelings is a sin against the imagination.
SEAMUS HEANEY