The murder of Sean Brown hurt my soul.
SEAMUS HEANEYI’m not personally obsessed with death. At a certain age, the light that you live in is inhabited by the shades – it ’tis.
More Seamus Heaney Quotes
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In a war situation or where violence and injustice are prevalent, poetry is called upon to be something more than a thing of beauty.
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But that citizen’s perception was also at one with the truth in recognizing that the very brutality of the means by which the IRA were pursuing change was destructive of the trust upon which new possibilities would have to be based.
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I feel myself part of something. Not only being part of a community but part of an actual moment and a movement of Irish writing and art. That sense of being part of the whole thing is the deepest joy.
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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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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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As a young poet, you need corroboration, and that’s what publication does.
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The end of art is peace.
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One doesn’t want one’s identity coerced.
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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.
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Poetry is a domestic art, most itself when most at home.
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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.
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Poetry is more a threshold than a path.
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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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The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.
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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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One of the best descriptions of the type of writer I am was given by Tom Paulin, who described himself as a ‘binge’ writer – like a binge drinker. I go on binges.
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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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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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I credit poetry for making this space-walk possible.
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The poet is on the side of undeceiving the world.
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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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Even if the last move did not succeed, the inner command says move again.
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Poetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to it.
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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 don’t think my intelligence is naturally analytic or political.
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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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