I’m not personally obsessed with death. At a certain age, the light that you live in is inhabited by the shades – it ’tis.
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 suppose you inevitably fall into habits of expression.
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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.
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I’m very conscious that people dear to me are alive in my imagination – poets in particular.
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I came from a farming background, and my career was teaching.
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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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I don’t think my intelligence is naturally analytic or political.
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Poetry is more a threshold than a path.
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I spend almost every morning with mail.
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Poetry is what we do to break bread with the dead.
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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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I’m a firm believer in learning by heart.
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Even if the last move did not succeed, the inner command says move again.
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Every time you read a poem aloud to yourself in the presence of others, you are reading it into yourself and them. Voice helps to carry words farther and deeper than the eye.
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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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Anybody serious about poetry knows how hard it is to achieve anything worthwhile in it.
SEAMUS HEANEY