The Heaneys were aristocrats, in the sense that they took for granted a code of behavior that was given and unspoken. Argumentation, persuasion, speech itself, for God’s sake, just seemed otiose and superfluous to them.
SEAMUS HEANEYYour temperament is what you write with, but it’s also how you deal with the world.
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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My point is there’s a hidden Scotland in anyone who speaks the Northern Ireland speech. It’s a terrific complicating factor, not just in Northern Ireland, but Ireland generally.
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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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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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Memory has always been fundamental for me. In fact, remembering what I had forgotten is the way most of the poems get started.
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In Northern Ireland, helicopters are not usually used to promote poetry.
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We go to poetry, we go to literature in general, to be forwarded within ourselves.
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A person from Northern Ireland is naturally cautious.
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I spend almost every morning with mail.
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I’m a firm believer in learning by heart.
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I credit poetry for making this space-walk possible.
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As a young poet, you need corroboration, and that’s what publication does.
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Then as the years went on and my listening became more deliberate, I would climb up on an arm of our big sofa to get my ear closer to the wireless speaker.
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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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The fact of the matter is that the most unexpected and miraculous thing in my life was the arrival in it of poetry itself – as a vocation and an elevation almost.
SEAMUS HEANEY