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 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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Since I was a schoolboy, I’ve been used to being recognized on the road by old and young, and being bantered with and, indeed, being taunted.
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I always believed that whatever had to be written would somehow get itself written.
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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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I’ve been in the habit of helping people.
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We go to poetry, we go to literature in general, to be forwarded within ourselves.
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Every 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.
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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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Poetry is more a threshold than a path.
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In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself.
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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 came from a farming background, and my career was teaching.
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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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When I first encountered the name of the city of Stockholm, I little thought that I would ever visit it, never mind end up being welcomed to it as a guest of the Swedish Academy and the Nobel Foundation.
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Sonnet is about movement in a form.
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I don’t do as many readings as I used to. There was a time when I was on the road a lot more, at home in Ireland, in Britain, in Canada and the States, a time when I had more stamina and appetite for it.
SEAMUS HEANEY