One doesn’t want one’s identity coerced.
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 think childhood is, generally speaking, a preparation for disappointment.
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Even if the last move did not succeed, the inner command says move again.
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I’m a firm believer in learning by heart.
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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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I think of Dermot Healy as the heir to Patrick Kavanagh.
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In a way, Anglo-Saxon poetry cannot be translated.
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The experiment of poetry, as far as I am concerned, happens when the poem carries you beyond where you could have reasonably expected to go.
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In poetry, everything can be faked but the intensity of utterance.
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Write whatever you like!
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Poetry is what we do to break bread with the dead.
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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.
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I suppose you could say my father’s world was Thomas Hardy and my mother’s D.H. Lawrence.
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The faking of feelings is a sin against the imagination.
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The kind of poet who founds and reconstitutes values is somebody like Yeats or Whitman – these are public value-founders.
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I spend almost every morning with mail.
SEAMUS HEANEY