I always had a superstitious fear of setting up a too well-designed writing place and then finding that the writing had absconded.
SEAMUS HEANEYMy 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.
More Seamus Heaney Quotes
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In poetry, everything can be faked but the intensity of utterance.
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Poetry is a domestic art, most itself when most at home.
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I believe we are put here to improve civilisation.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
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 -
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 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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At home in Ireland, there’s a habit of avoidance, an ironical attitude towards the authority figure.
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One doesn’t want one’s identity coerced.
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I don’t think my intelligence is naturally analytic or political.
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Then as the years went on and my listening became more deliberate, I would climb up on an arm of our big sofa to get my ear closer to the wireless speaker.
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Write whatever you like!
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There’s never going to be a united Ireland, you know.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
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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In a way, Anglo-Saxon poetry cannot be translated.
SEAMUS HEANEY