Without needing to be theoretically instructed, consciousness quickly realizes that it is the site of variously contending discourses.
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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If poetry and the arts do anything, they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness.
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The amount of sensory material stored up or stored down in the brain’s and the body’s systems is inestimable. It’s like a culture at the bottom of a jar, although it doesn’t grow, I think, or help anything else to grow unless you find a way to reach it and touch it.
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In Northern Ireland, helicopters are not usually used to promote poetry.
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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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A public expectation, it has to be said, not of poetry as such but of political positions variously approvable by mutually disapproving groups.
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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.
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My experience is that prose usually equals duty – last minute, overdue-deadline stuff or a panic lecture to be written.
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The kinds of truth that art gives us many, many times are small truths. They don’t have the resonance of an encyclical from the Pope stating an eternal truth, but they partake of the quality of eternity. There is a sort of timeless delight in them.
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The murder of Sean Brown hurt my soul.
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I’m a firm believer in learning by heart.
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You can have Irish identity in the north and also have your Irish passport.
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Sonnet is about movement in a form.
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Anybody serious about poetry knows how hard it is to achieve anything worthwhile in it.
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I spend almost every morning with mail.
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Nowadays, what an award gives is a sense of solidarity with the poetry guild, as it were: sustenance coming from the assent of your peers on the judging panel.
SEAMUS HEANEY