I don’t do as many readings as I used to. There was a time when I was on the road a lot more, at home in Ireland, in Britain, in Canada and the States, a time when I had more stamina and appetite for it.
SEAMUS HEANEYWe go to poetry, we go to literature in general, to be forwarded within ourselves.
More Seamus Heaney Quotes
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I feel myself part of something. Not only being part of a community but part of an actual moment and a movement of Irish writing and art. That sense of being part of the whole thing is the deepest joy.
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Sonnet is about movement in a form.
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I’ve said it before about the Nobel Prize: it’s like being struck by a more or less benign avalanche. It was unexpected, unlooked for, and extraordinary.
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A public expectation, it has to be said, not of poetry as such but of political positions variously approvable by mutually disapproving groups.
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In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself.
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Poetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to it.
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There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you.
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I came from a farming background, and my career was teaching.
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I’ve been in the habit of helping people.
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Anyone born and bred in Northern Ireland can’t be too optimistic.
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In Northern Ireland, helicopters are not usually used to promote poetry.
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I think childhood is, generally speaking, a preparation for disappointment.
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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 suppose you inevitably fall into habits of expression.
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I think that water is immediately interesting. It’s just, as an element, it is full of life. It is associated with origin; it is bright – it reflects you.
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I’m a firm believer in learning by heart.
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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’m not personally obsessed with death. At a certain age, the light that you live in is inhabited by the shades – it ’tis.
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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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As writers and readers, as sinners and citizens, our realism and our aesthetic sense make us wary of crediting the positive note.
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One doesn’t want one’s identity coerced.
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If poetry and the arts do anything, they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness.
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Write whatever you like!
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In a way, Anglo-Saxon poetry cannot be translated.
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I always had a superstitious fear of setting up a too well-designed writing place and then finding that the writing had absconded.
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Whether it be a matter of personal relations within a marriage or political initiatives within a peace process, there is no sure-fire do-it-yourself kit.
SEAMUS HEANEY