Since I was a schoolboy, I’ve been used to being recognized on the road by old and young, and being bantered with and, indeed, being taunted.
SEAMUS HEANEYWhen 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.
More Seamus Heaney Quotes
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Eternal life can mean utter reverence for life itself.
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You can have Irish identity in the north and also have your Irish passport.
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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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The murder of Sean Brown hurt my soul.
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Write whatever you like!
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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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Poetry is what we do to break bread with the dead.
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Even if the last move did not succeed, the inner command says move again.
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Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.
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I think of Dermot Healy as the heir to Patrick Kavanagh.
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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 think that water is immediately interesting. It’s just, as an element, it is full of life. It is associated with origin; it is bright – it reflects you.
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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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Tom Sleigh’s poetry is hard-earned and well founded. I great admire the way it refuses to cut emotional corners and yet achieves a sense of lyric absolution.
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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.
SEAMUS HEANEY