The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.
SEAMUS HEANEYEvery 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.
More Seamus Heaney Quotes
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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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The group of writers I had grown up with in the ’60s – Derek Mahon, Michael Longley, James Simmons, John Hewitt, Paul Muldoon – formed a very necessary and self-sustaining group.
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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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If poetry and the arts do anything, they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness.
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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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Poetry is a domestic art, most itself when most at home.
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There’s never going to be a united Ireland, you know.
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It’s difficult to learn poems off by heart that don’t rhyme.
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My father was a creature of the archaic world, really. He would have been entirely at home in a Gaelic hill-fort. His side of the family, and the houses I associate with his side of the family, belonged to a traditional rural Ireland.
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There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you.
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History says, ‘Don’t hope on this side of the grave.’
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Poetry is what we do to break bread with the dead.
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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 always believed that whatever had to be written would somehow get itself written.
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Your temperament is what you write with, but it’s also how you deal with the world.
SEAMUS HEANEY