Poetry is a domestic art, most itself when most at home.
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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Your temperament is what you write with, but it’s also how you deal with the world.
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I think of the bog as a feminine goddess-ridden ground, rather like the territory of Ireland itself.
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My father and mother had no sense of entitlement for their children.
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I suppose you inevitably fall into habits of expression.
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My point is there’s a hidden Scotland in anyone who speaks the Northern Ireland speech. It’s a terrific complicating factor, not just in Northern Ireland, but Ireland generally.
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Eternal life can mean utter reverence for life itself.
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Poems that come swiftly are usually the ones that you keep.
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As a young poet, you need corroboration, and that’s what publication does.
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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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Without needing to be theoretically instructed, consciousness quickly realizes that it is the site of variously contending discourses.
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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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Even if the last move did not succeed, the inner command says move again.
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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 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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There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you.
SEAMUS HEANEY