History says, ‘Don’t hope on this side of the grave.’
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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I think of Dermot Healy as the heir to Patrick Kavanagh.
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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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Write whatever you like!
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The completely solitary self: that’s where poetry comes from, and it gets isolated by crisis, and those crises are often very intimate also.
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I believe we are put here to improve civilisation.
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I’ve been in the habit of helping people.
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I’m a firm believer in learning by heart.
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Anybody serious about poetry knows how hard it is to achieve anything worthwhile in it.
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You can have Irish identity in the north and also have your Irish passport.
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I came from a farming background, and my career was teaching.
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Poetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to it.
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I spend almost every morning with mail.
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Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.
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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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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.
SEAMUS HEANEY