If poetry and the arts do anything, they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness.
SEAMUS HEANEYI think of the bog as a feminine goddess-ridden ground, rather like the territory of Ireland itself.
More Seamus Heaney Quotes
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I think of Dermot Healy as the heir to Patrick Kavanagh.
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I spend almost every morning with mail.
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There’s never going to be a united Ireland, you know.
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In my early teens, I acquired a kind of representative status: went on behalf of the family to wakes and funerals and so on. And I would be counted on as an adult contributor when it came to farm work – the hay in the summertime, for example.
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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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Dylan Thomas is now as much a case history as a chapter in the history of poetry.
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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 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’ve said it before about the Nobel Prize: it’s like being struck by a more or less benign avalanche. It was unexpected, unlooked for, and extraordinary.
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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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Whether it be a matter of personal relations within a marriage or political initiatives within a peace process, there is no sure-fire do-it-yourself kit.
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As writers and readers, as sinners and citizens, our realism and our aesthetic sense make us wary of crediting the positive note.
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You yourself don’t have to be shaken by mortal danger in order to feel your mortality.
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The poet is on the side of undeceiving the world.
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Manifesting that order of poetry where we can at last grow up to that which we stored up as we grew.
SEAMUS HEANEY