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.
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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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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Every time you read a poem aloud to yourself in the presence of others, you are reading it into yourself and them. Voice helps to carry words farther and deeper than the eye.
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Write whatever you like!
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I suppose you inevitably fall into habits of expression.
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History says, ‘Don’t hope on this side of the grave.’
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What I’ve said before, only half in joke, is that everybody in Ireland is famous. Or, maybe better, say everybody is familiar.
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One doesn’t want one’s identity coerced.
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I always had a superstitious fear of setting up a too well-designed writing place and then finding that the writing had absconded.
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Poetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to it.
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Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.
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Poetry is more a threshold than a path.
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I spend almost every morning with mail.
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I think childhood is, generally speaking, a preparation for disappointment.
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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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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.
SEAMUS HEANEY