I always believed that whatever had to be written would somehow get itself written.
SEAMUS HEANEYI came from a farming background, and my career was teaching.
More Seamus Heaney Quotes
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In my early teens, I acquired a kind of representative status: went on behalf of the family to wakes and funerals and so on. And I would be counted on as an adult contributor when it came to farm work – the hay in the summertime, for example.
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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.
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If poetry and the arts do anything, they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness.
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When I first encountered the name of the city of Stockholm, I little thought that I would ever visit it, never mind end up being welcomed to it as a guest of the Swedish Academy and the Nobel Foundation.
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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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Even if the last move did not succeed, the inner command says move again.
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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 think childhood is, generally speaking, a preparation for disappointment.
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The poet is on the side of undeceiving the world.
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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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There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you.
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Poetry is more a threshold than a path.
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Sonnet is about movement in a form.
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My father was a creature of the archaic world, really. He would have been entirely at home in a Gaelic hill-fort. His side of the family, and the houses I associate with his side of the family, belonged to a traditional rural Ireland.
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It’s difficult to learn poems off by heart that don’t rhyme.
SEAMUS HEANEY