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.
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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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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If poetry and the arts do anything, they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness.
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In Northern Ireland, helicopters are not usually used to promote poetry.
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The faking of feelings is a sin against the imagination.
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I’ve been in the habit of helping people.
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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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I think childhood is, generally speaking, a preparation for disappointment.
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I’ve said it before about the Nobel Prize: it’s like being struck by a more or less benign avalanche. It was unexpected, unlooked for, and extraordinary.
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Poems that come swiftly are usually the ones that you keep.
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The end of art is peace.
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There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you.
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A person from Northern Ireland is naturally cautious.
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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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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.
SEAMUS HEANEY