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There’s never going to be a united Ireland, you know.

Seamus Heaney

The gift of writing is to be self-forgetful, to get a surge of inner life or inner supply or unexpected sense of empowerment, to be afloat, to be out of yourself.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Empowerment Expectation Forget Gift Writing Yourself
My experience is that prose usually equals duty – last minute, overdue-deadline stuff or a panic lecture to be written.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Equal Evidence Experience Writing
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.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Experiment Kind Myself Poetry Programme Writing
As writers and readers, as sinners and citizens, our realism and our aesthetic sense make us wary of crediting the positive note.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Citizenship Note Positive Reading Sin Writing
History says, ‘Don’t hope on this side of the grave.’
SEAMUS HEANEY

Grave History Hope Side
If poetry and the arts do anything, they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Art Life Poetry Yourself
The fact of the matter is that the most unexpected and miraculous thing in my life was the arrival in it of poetry itself – as a vocation and an elevation almost.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Arrival Fact Life Miracle Myself Poetry
What I’ve said before, only half in joke, is that everybody in Ireland is famous. Or, maybe better, say everybody is familiar.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Better Famous Myself Talk
I’ve been in the habit of helping people.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Habit Help Myself People
I’m very conscious that people dear to me are alive in my imagination – poets in particular.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Conscious Imagination Myself People Poet
I don’t think my intelligence is naturally analytic or political.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Intelligence Natural Politics Thinking
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.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Associate Creature Family Father Traditional World
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.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Amount Culture Growth Help Material Myself System Thinking
Eternal life can mean utter reverence for life itself.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Forever Life
You can have Irish identity in the north and also have your Irish passport.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Identify Passport Yourself
My language and my sensibility are yearning to admit a kind of religious or transcendent dimension. But then there’s the reality: there’s no Heaven, no afterlife of the sort we were promised, and no personal God.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Dimension God Language Personal Promise Reality Yearning

There’s never going to be a united Ireland, you know.

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There’s never going to be a united Ireland, you know.

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Popular Authors

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