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.
SEAMUS HEANEYThere’s never going to be a united Ireland, you know.
More Seamus Heaney Quotes
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The experiment of poetry, as far as I am concerned, happens when the poem carries you beyond where you could have reasonably expected to go.
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I spend almost every morning with mail.
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At home in Ireland, there’s a habit of avoidance, an ironical attitude towards the authority figure.
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The experimental poetry thing is not my thing. It’s a programme of the avant-garde: basically a refusal of the kind of poetry I write.
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Dylan Thomas is now as much a case history as a chapter in the history of poetry.
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The poet is on the side of undeceiving the world.
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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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I came from a farming background, and my career was teaching.
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It’s difficult to learn poems off by heart that don’t rhyme.
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I think that water is immediately interesting. It’s just, as an element, it is full of life. It is associated with origin; it is bright – it reflects you.
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Anyone born and bred in Northern Ireland can’t be too optimistic.
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I don’t think my intelligence is naturally analytic or political.
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I think childhood is, generally speaking, a preparation for disappointment.
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Poetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to it.
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When I first encountered the name of the city of Stockholm, I little thought that I would ever visit it, never mind end up being welcomed to it as a guest of the Swedish Academy and the Nobel Foundation.
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