Write whatever you like!
SEAMUS HEANEYThe Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.
More Seamus Heaney Quotes
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There’s never going to be a united Ireland, you know.
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I came from a farming background, and my career was teaching.
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I credit poetry for making this space-walk possible.
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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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I’ve always associated the moment of writing with a moment of lift, of joy, of unexpected reward.
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My point is there’s a hidden Scotland in anyone who speaks the Northern Ireland speech. It’s a terrific complicating factor, not just in Northern Ireland, but Ireland generally.
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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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You yourself don’t have to be shaken by mortal danger in order to feel your mortality.
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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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In poetry, everything can be faked but the intensity of utterance.
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Anyone born and bred in Northern Ireland can’t be too optimistic.
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Even if the last move did not succeed, the inner command says move again.
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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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I think of Dermot Healy as the heir to Patrick Kavanagh.
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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.
SEAMUS HEANEY