I’ve always associated the moment of writing with a moment of lift, of joy, of unexpected reward.
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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My language and my sensibility are yearning to admit a kind of religious or transcendent dimension. But then there’s the reality: there’s no Heaven, no afterlife of the sort we were promised, and no personal God.
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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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In a way, Anglo-Saxon poetry cannot be translated.
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Without needing to be theoretically instructed, consciousness quickly realizes that it is the site of variously contending discourses.
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In Northern Ireland, helicopters are not usually used to promote poetry.
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I think childhood is, generally speaking, a preparation for disappointment.
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I would say that something important for me and for my generation in Northern Ireland was the 1947 Education Act, which allowed students who won scholarships to go on to secondary schools and thence to university.
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A public expectation, it has to be said, not of poetry as such but of political positions variously approvable by mutually disapproving groups.
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The problem as you get older, is that you become more self-aware. At the same time, you have to surprise yourself. There’s no way of arranging the surprise, so it is tricky.
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I spend almost every morning with mail.
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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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But that citizen’s perception was also at one with the truth in recognizing that the very brutality of the means by which the IRA were pursuing change was destructive of the trust upon which new possibilities would have to be based.
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It is very true to say that work done by writers is quite often an attempt to give solid expression to that which is bothering them. They feel they have got it right if they express the stress.
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I feel myself part of something. Not only being part of a community but part of an actual moment and a movement of Irish writing and art. That sense of being part of the whole thing is the deepest joy.
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There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you.
SEAMUS HEANEY