My father and mother had no sense of entitlement for their children.
SEAMUS HEANEYA public expectation, it has to be said, not of poetry as such but of political positions variously approvable by mutually disapproving groups.
More Seamus Heaney Quotes
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A person from Northern Ireland is naturally cautious.
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Anyone born and bred in Northern Ireland can’t be too optimistic.
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Poetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to it.
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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 completely solitary self: that’s where poetry comes from, and it gets isolated by crisis, and those crises are often very intimate also.
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I suppose you inevitably fall into habits of expression.
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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 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 suppose you could say my father’s world was Thomas Hardy and my mother’s D.H. Lawrence.
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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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In poetry, everything can be faked but the intensity of utterance.
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There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you.
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Poetry is a domestic art, most itself when most at home.
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But that citizen’s perception was also at one with the truth in recognizing that the very brutality of the means by which the IRA were pursuing change was destructive of the trust upon which new possibilities would have to be based.
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The end of art is peace.
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