My experience is that prose usually equals duty – last minute, overdue-deadline stuff or a panic lecture to be written.
SEAMUS HEANEYMy father and mother had no sense of entitlement for their children.
More Seamus Heaney Quotes
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I think of the bog as a feminine goddess-ridden ground, rather like the territory of Ireland itself.
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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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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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I have begun to think of life as a series of ripples widening out from an original center.
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The kind of poet who founds and reconstitutes values is somebody like Yeats or Whitman – these are public value-founders.
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Whether 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.
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Poetry is what we do to break bread with the dead.
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What I’ve said before, only half in joke, is that everybody in Ireland is famous. Or, maybe better, say everybody is familiar.
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I’ve been in the habit of helping people.
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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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Anyone born and bred in Northern Ireland can’t be too optimistic.
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Loyalism, or Unionism, or Protestantism, or whatever you want to call it, in Northern Ireland – it operates not as a class system, but a caste system.
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Write whatever you like!
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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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Memory has always been fundamental for me. In fact, remembering what I had forgotten is the way most of the poems get started.
SEAMUS HEANEY