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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Anyone born and bred in Northern Ireland can’t be too optimistic.
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The poet is on the side of undeceiving the world.
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One doesn’t want one’s identity coerced.
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I’ve been in the habit of helping people.
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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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I always believed that whatever had to be written would somehow get itself written.
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Poetry is more a threshold than a path.
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The group of writers I had grown up with in the ’60s – Derek Mahon, Michael Longley, James Simmons, John Hewitt, Paul Muldoon – formed a very necessary and self-sustaining group.
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It is very true to say that work done by writers is quite often an attempt to give solid expression to that which is bothering them. They feel they have got it right if they express the stress.
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Even if the last move did not succeed, the inner command says move again.
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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 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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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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You can have Irish identity in the north and also have your Irish passport.
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