The faking of feelings is a sin against the imagination.
SEAMUS HEANEYI’ve always associated the moment of writing with a moment of lift, of joy, of unexpected reward.
More Seamus Heaney Quotes
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I suppose you inevitably fall into habits of expression.
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If poetry and the arts do anything, they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness.
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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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I think the first little jolt I got was reading Gerard Manley Hopkins – I liked other poems… but Hopkins was kind of electric for me – he changed the rules with speech, and the whole intensity of the language was there and so on.
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One 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.
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In Northern Ireland, helicopters are not usually used to promote poetry.
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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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Anybody serious about poetry knows how hard it is to achieve anything worthwhile in it.
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The poet is on the side of undeceiving the world.
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As writers and readers, as sinners and citizens, our realism and our aesthetic sense make us wary of crediting the positive note.
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I have begun to think of life as a series of ripples widening out from an original center.
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Nowadays, what an award gives is a sense of solidarity with the poetry guild, as it were: sustenance coming from the assent of your peers on the judging panel.
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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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Dylan Thomas is now as much a case history as a chapter in the history of poetry.
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Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.
SEAMUS HEANEY