In my early teens, I acquired a kind of representative status: went on behalf of the family to wakes and funerals and so on. And I would be counted on as an adult contributor when it came to farm work – the hay in the summertime, for example.
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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Anybody serious about poetry knows how hard it is to achieve anything worthwhile in it.
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I think of Dermot Healy as the heir to Patrick Kavanagh.
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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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There’s never going to be a united Ireland, you know.
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In poetry, everything can be faked but the intensity of utterance.
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Memory has always been fundamental for me. In fact, remembering what I had forgotten is the way most of the poems get started.
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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.
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I don’t do as many readings as I used to. There was a time when I was on the road a lot more, at home in Ireland, in Britain, in Canada and the States, a time when I had more stamina and appetite for it.
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I’ve been in the habit of helping people.
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The fact of the matter is that the most unexpected and miraculous thing in my life was the arrival in it of poetry itself – as a vocation and an elevation almost.
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The murder of Sean Brown hurt my soul.
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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.
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The kinds of truth that art gives us many, many times are small truths. They don’t have the resonance of an encyclical from the Pope stating an eternal truth, but they partake of the quality of eternity. There is a sort of timeless delight in them.
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My experience is that prose usually equals duty – last minute, overdue-deadline stuff or a panic lecture to be written.
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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