The group of writers I had grown up with in the ’60s – Derek Mahon, Michael Longley, James Simmons, John Hewitt, Paul Muldoon – formed a very necessary and self-sustaining group.
SEAMUS HEANEYI think childhood is, generally speaking, a preparation for disappointment.
More Seamus Heaney Quotes
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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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In poetry, everything can be faked but the intensity of utterance.
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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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My language and my sensibility are yearning to admit a kind of religious or transcendent dimension. But then there’s the reality: there’s no Heaven, no afterlife of the sort we were promised, and no personal God.
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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.
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Sonnet is about movement in a form.
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In the United States, in poetry workshops, it’s now quite a thing to make graduate students learn poems by heart.
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Tom Sleigh’s poetry is hard-earned and well founded. I great admire the way it refuses to cut emotional corners and yet achieves a sense of lyric absolution.
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I have begun to think of life as a series of ripples widening out from an original center.
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Poems that come swiftly are usually the ones that you keep.
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Without needing to be theoretically instructed, consciousness quickly realizes that it is the site of variously contending discourses.
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I would say that something important for me and for my generation in Northern Ireland was the 1947 Education Act, which allowed students who won scholarships to go on to secondary schools and thence to university.
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I’ve been in the habit of helping people.
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I think of Dermot Healy as the heir to Patrick Kavanagh.
SEAMUS HEANEY