I don’t think my intelligence is naturally analytic or political.
SEAMUS HEANEYIn Northern Ireland, helicopters are not usually used to promote poetry.
More Seamus Heaney Quotes
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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.
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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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I have begun to think of life as a series of ripples widening out from an original center.
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The murder of Sean Brown hurt my soul.
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Write whatever you like!
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You can have Irish identity in the north and also have your Irish passport.
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As writers and readers, as sinners and citizens, our realism and our aesthetic sense make us wary of crediting the positive note.
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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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In the United States, in poetry workshops, it’s now quite a thing to make graduate students learn poems by heart.
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I’ve said it before about the Nobel Prize: it’s like being struck by a more or less benign avalanche. It was unexpected, unlooked for, and extraordinary.
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One doesn’t want one’s identity coerced.
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We go to poetry, we go to literature in general, to be forwarded within ourselves.
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I think childhood is, generally speaking, a preparation for disappointment.
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Poems that come swiftly are usually the ones that you keep.
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My language and my sensibility are yearning to admit a kind of religious or transcendent dimension. But then there’s the reality: there’s no Heaven, no afterlife of the sort we were promised, and no personal God.
SEAMUS HEANEY