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Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.

Seamus Heaney

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.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Brutal Change Citizenship Destruction Perception Possible Pursue Recognition
The faking of feelings is a sin against the imagination.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Deep Fake Feeling Imagination Sin
I’m not personally obsessed with death. At a certain age, the light that you live in is inhabited by the shades – it ’tis.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Death Light Myself Obsession Personally
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.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Marriage Peace Personal Politics
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
My father and mother had no sense of entitlement for their children.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Children Father Mom Myself
The completely solitary self: that’s where poetry comes from, and it gets isolated by crisis, and those crises are often very intimate also.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Complete Crisis Intimate Isolation Poetry
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.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Best Description Himself Myself Writing
I suppose you could say my father’s world was Thomas Hardy and my mother’s D.H. Lawrence.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Father Myself World
In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Fact Lyrics Medium Poetry Recognition Truth
Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Hope Maintain Start Yourself
Poems that come swiftly are usually the ones that you keep.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Oneself Poem Swift
In Northern Ireland, helicopters are not usually used to promote poetry.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Poetry Promotion
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.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Expectation Experiment Myself Poetry Reason
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.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Complication Factor Myself Point Talk
Dylan Thomas is now as much a case history as a chapter in the history of poetry.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Case Chapter History Poetry

Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.

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Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.

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Popular Authors

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