The end of art is peace.
SEAMUS HEANEYEternal life can mean utter reverence for life itself.
More Seamus Heaney Quotes
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The murder of Sean Brown hurt my soul.
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I suppose you inevitably fall into habits of expression.
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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.
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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.
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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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If poetry and the arts do anything, they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness.
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Memory has always been fundamental for me. In fact, remembering what I had forgotten is the way most of the poems get started.
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Poetry is a domestic art, most itself when most at home.
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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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I’ve always associated the moment of writing with a moment of lift, of joy, of unexpected reward.
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It’s difficult to learn poems off by heart that don’t rhyme.
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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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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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I always believed that whatever had to be written would somehow get itself written.
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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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Even if the last move did not succeed, the inner command says move again.
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The fact of the matter is that the most unexpected and miraculous thing in my life was the arrival in it of poetry itself – as a vocation and an elevation almost.
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The poet is on the side of undeceiving the world.
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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.
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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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The faking of feelings is a sin against the imagination.
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Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.
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I don’t think my intelligence is naturally analytic or political.
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There’s never going to be a united Ireland, you know.
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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.
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At home in Ireland, there’s a habit of avoidance, an ironical attitude towards the authority figure.
SEAMUS HEANEY