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.
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 came from a farming background, and my career was teaching.
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The faking of feelings is a sin against the imagination.
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I’ve been in the habit of helping people.
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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.
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If poetry and the arts do anything, they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness.
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The completely solitary self: that’s where poetry comes from, and it gets isolated by crisis, and those crises are often very intimate also.
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The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.
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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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Anyone born and bred in Northern Ireland can’t be too optimistic.
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We go to poetry, we go to literature in general, to be forwarded within ourselves.
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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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Poems that come swiftly are usually the ones that you keep.
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Poetry is more a threshold than a path.
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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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Poetry is what we do to break bread with the dead.
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