The kinds of truth that art gives us many, many times are small truths. They don’t have the resonance of an encyclical from the Pope stating an eternal truth, but they partake of the quality of eternity. There is a sort of timeless delight in them.
SEAMUS HEANEYThe completely solitary self: that’s where poetry comes from, and it gets isolated by crisis, and those crises are often very intimate also.
More Seamus Heaney Quotes
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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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There’s never going to be a united Ireland, you know.
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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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Manifesting that order of poetry where we can at last grow up to that which we stored up as we grew.
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In a war situation or where violence and injustice are prevalent, poetry is called upon to be something more than a thing of beauty.
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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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Dylan Thomas is now as much a case history as a chapter in the history of poetry.
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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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Your temperament is what you write with, but it’s also how you deal with the world.
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I suppose you inevitably fall into habits of expression.
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Write whatever you like!
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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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Anyone born and bred in Northern Ireland can’t be too optimistic.
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I spend almost every morning with mail.
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There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you.
SEAMUS HEANEY