I came from a farming background, and my career was teaching.
SEAMUS HEANEYI’m a firm believer in learning by heart.
More Seamus Heaney Quotes
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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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I credit poetry for making this space-walk possible.
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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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The end of art is peace.
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The completely solitary self: that’s where poetry comes from, and it gets isolated by crisis, and those crises are often very intimate also.
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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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History says, ‘Don’t hope on this side of the grave.’
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Sonnet is about movement in a form.
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Then as the years went on and my listening became more deliberate, I would climb up on an arm of our big sofa to get my ear closer to the wireless speaker.
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I think childhood is, generally speaking, a preparation for disappointment.
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At home in Ireland, there’s a habit of avoidance, an ironical attitude towards the authority figure.
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Anybody serious about poetry knows how hard it is to achieve anything worthwhile in it.
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The fact of the matter is that the most unexpected and miraculous thing in my life was the arrival in it of poetry itself – as a vocation and an elevation almost.
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The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.
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We go to poetry, we go to literature in general, to be forwarded within ourselves.
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