Without needing to be theoretically instructed, consciousness quickly realizes that it is the site of variously contending discourses.
SEAMUS HEANEYIf you go into an underground train in London – probably anywhere, but chiefly in London – there’s that sense of almost entering a ghostly dimension. People are very still and quiet; they don’t exchange many pleasantries.
More Seamus Heaney Quotes
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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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The faking of feelings is a sin against the imagination.
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I’ve been in the habit of helping people.
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Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.
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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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Poetry is a domestic art, most itself when most at home.
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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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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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As a young poet, you need corroboration, and that’s what publication does.
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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 think of Dermot Healy as the heir to Patrick Kavanagh.
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We go to poetry, we go to literature in general, to be forwarded within ourselves.
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I believe we are put here to improve civilisation.
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Poetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to it.
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Anyone born and bred in Northern Ireland can’t be too optimistic.
SEAMUS HEANEY






