I think of the bog as a feminine goddess-ridden ground, rather like the territory of Ireland itself.
SEAMUS HEANEYMy father and mother had no sense of entitlement for their children.
More Seamus Heaney Quotes
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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 think childhood is, generally speaking, a preparation for disappointment.
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If poetry and the arts do anything, they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness.
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There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you.
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Sonnet is about movement in a form.
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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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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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As writers and readers, as sinners and citizens, our realism and our aesthetic sense make us wary of crediting the positive note.
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You can have Irish identity in the north and also have your Irish passport.
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I came from a farming background, and my career was teaching.
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Poetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to it.
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I suppose you could say my father’s world was Thomas Hardy and my mother’s D.H. Lawrence.
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In poetry, everything can be faked but the intensity of utterance.
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The problem as you get older, is that you become more self-aware. At the same time, you have to surprise yourself. There’s no way of arranging the surprise, so it is tricky.
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Poems that come swiftly are usually the ones that you keep.
SEAMUS HEANEY