One doesn’t want one’s identity coerced.
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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Even if the last move did not succeed, the inner command says move again.
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Poetry is a domestic art, most itself when most at home.
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My father and mother had no sense of entitlement for their children.
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If poetry and the arts do anything, they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness.
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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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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.
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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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I’ve been in the habit of helping people.
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One of the best descriptions of the type of writer I am was given by Tom Paulin, who described himself as a ‘binge’ writer – like a binge drinker. I go on binges.
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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 what we do to break bread with the dead.
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At home in Ireland, there’s a habit of avoidance, an ironical attitude towards the authority figure.
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I feel myself part of something. Not only being part of a community but part of an actual moment and a movement of Irish writing and art. That sense of being part of the whole thing is the deepest joy.
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I credit poetry for making this space-walk possible.
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Dylan Thomas is now as much a case history as a chapter in the history of poetry.
SEAMUS HEANEY