Poetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to it.
SEAMUS HEANEYWhether it be a matter of personal relations within a marriage or political initiatives within a peace process, there is no sure-fire do-it-yourself kit.
More Seamus Heaney Quotes
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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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I’m not personally obsessed with death. At a certain age, the light that you live in is inhabited by the shades – it ’tis.
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I don’t do as many readings as I used to. There was a time when I was on the road a lot more, at home in Ireland, in Britain, in Canada and the States, a time when I had more stamina and appetite for it.
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In the United States, in poetry workshops, it’s now quite a thing to make graduate students learn poems by heart.
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As a young poet, you need corroboration, and that’s what publication does.
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The amount of sensory material stored up or stored down in the brain’s and the body’s systems is inestimable. It’s like a culture at the bottom of a jar, although it doesn’t grow, I think, or help anything else to grow unless you find a way to reach it and touch it.
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The murder of Sean Brown hurt my soul.
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I think of Dermot Healy as the heir to Patrick Kavanagh.
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Manifesting that order of poetry where we can at last grow up to that which we stored up as we grew.
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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.
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You can have Irish identity in the north and also have your Irish passport.
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There’s never going to be a united Ireland, you know.
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The Heaneys were aristocrats, in the sense that they took for granted a code of behavior that was given and unspoken. Argumentation, persuasion, speech itself, for God’s sake, just seemed otiose and superfluous to them.
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My experience is that prose usually equals duty – last minute, overdue-deadline stuff or a panic lecture to be written.
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History says, ‘Don’t hope on this side of the grave.’
SEAMUS HEANEY