The kinds of truth that art gives us many, many times are small truths. They don’t have the resonance of an encyclical from the Pope stating an eternal truth, but they partake of the quality of eternity. There is a sort of timeless delight in them.
SEAMUS HEANEYI always had a superstitious fear of setting up a too well-designed writing place and then finding that the writing had absconded.
More Seamus Heaney Quotes
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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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It’s difficult to learn poems off by heart that don’t rhyme.
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Poetry is more a threshold than a path.
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Every time you read a poem aloud to yourself in the presence of others, you are reading it into yourself and them. Voice helps to carry words farther and deeper than the eye.
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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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One doesn’t want one’s identity coerced.
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There’s never going to be a united Ireland, you know.
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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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I always believed that whatever had to be written would somehow get itself written.
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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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In a way, Anglo-Saxon poetry cannot be translated.
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Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.
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Sonnet is about movement in a form.
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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.
SEAMUS HEANEY