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I’m a firm believer in learning by heart.

Seamus Heaney

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.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Caste Loyalty Operation Religion System
You yourself don’t have to be shaken by mortal danger in order to feel your mortality.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Dangerous Feeling Mortal Order Yourself
The Heaneys were aristocrats, in the sense that they took for granted a code of behavior that was given and unspoken. Argumentation, persuasion, speech itself, for God’s sake, just seemed otiose and superfluous to them.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Argument Aristocrats Behavior God Talk
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.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Big Listening Myself Speaker
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 HEANEY

Art Eternity Forever Kind Quality Small Time Truth
My experience is that prose usually equals duty – last minute, overdue-deadline stuff or a panic lecture to be written.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Equal Evidence Experience Writing
Your temperament is what you write with, but it’s also how you deal with the world.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Deal Temperature World Writing
I think of Dermot Healy as the heir to Patrick Kavanagh.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Myself Thinking
Manifesting that order of poetry where we can at last grow up to that which we stored up as we grew.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Grow Manifestation Order Poetry Store
The poet is on the side of undeceiving the world.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Poet World
I spend almost every morning with mail.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Mail Morning Myself
At home in Ireland, there’s a habit of avoidance, an ironical attitude towards the authority figure.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Attitude Authority Avoid Figure Habit Home
Poetry is what we do to break bread with the dead.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Break Death Poetry
As writers and readers, as sinners and citizens, our realism and our aesthetic sense make us wary of crediting the positive note.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Citizenship Note Positive Reading Sin Writing
The end of art is peace.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Art End One Liner Peace
The gift of writing is to be self-forgetful, to get a surge of inner life or inner supply or unexpected sense of empowerment, to be afloat, to be out of yourself.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Empowerment Expectation Forget Gift Writing Yourself

I’m a firm believer in learning by heart.

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I’m a firm believer in learning by heart.

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