I always believed that whatever had to be written would somehow get itself written.
SEAMUS HEANEYWe go to poetry, we go to literature in general, to be forwarded within ourselves.
More Seamus Heaney Quotes
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It is very true to say that work done by writers is quite often an attempt to give solid expression to that which is bothering them. They feel they have got it right if they express the stress.
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Poetry is more a threshold than a path.
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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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The poet is on the side of undeceiving the world.
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I came from a farming background, and my career was teaching.
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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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A person from Northern Ireland is naturally cautious.
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Even if the last move did not succeed, the inner command says move again.
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The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.
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Nowadays, what an award gives is a sense of solidarity with the poetry guild, as it were: sustenance coming from the assent of your peers on the judging panel.
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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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The end of art is peace.
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Anybody serious about poetry knows how hard it is to achieve anything worthwhile in it.
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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.
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I have begun to think of life as a series of ripples widening out from an original center.
SEAMUS HEANEY