Loyalism, or Unionism, or Protestantism, or whatever you want to call it, in Northern Ireland – it operates not as a class system, but a caste system.
SEAMUS HEANEYManifesting that order of poetry where we can at last grow up to that which we stored up as we grew.
More Seamus Heaney Quotes
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I have begun to think of life as a series of ripples widening out from an original center.
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The faking of feelings is a sin against the imagination.
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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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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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The Heaneys were aristocrats, in the sense that they took for granted a code of behavior that was given and unspoken. Argumentation, persuasion, speech itself, for God’s sake, just seemed otiose and superfluous to them.
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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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Anybody serious about poetry knows how hard it is to achieve anything worthwhile in it.
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Write whatever you like!
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I credit poetry for making this space-walk possible.
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In a war situation or where violence and injustice are prevalent, poetry is called upon to be something more than a thing of beauty.
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The experimental poetry thing is not my thing. It’s a programme of the avant-garde: basically a refusal of the kind of poetry I write.
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At home in Ireland, there’s a habit of avoidance, an ironical attitude towards the authority figure.
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I came from a farming background, and my career was teaching.
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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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In poetry, everything can be faked but the intensity of utterance.
SEAMUS HEANEY