Poetry is a domestic art, most itself when most at home.
SEAMUS HEANEYIn Northern Ireland, helicopters are not usually used to promote poetry.
More Seamus Heaney Quotes
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Anybody serious about poetry knows how hard it is to achieve anything worthwhile in it.
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If you go into an underground train in London – probably anywhere, but chiefly in London – there’s that sense of almost entering a ghostly dimension. People are very still and quiet; they don’t exchange many pleasantries.
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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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In a way, Anglo-Saxon poetry cannot be translated.
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But that citizen’s perception was also at one with the truth in recognizing that the very brutality of the means by which the IRA were pursuing change was destructive of the trust upon which new possibilities would have to be based.
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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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I suppose you inevitably fall into habits of expression.
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It’s difficult to learn poems off by heart that don’t rhyme.
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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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I suppose you could say my father’s world was Thomas Hardy and my mother’s D.H. Lawrence.
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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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The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.
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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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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’ve always associated the moment of writing with a moment of lift, of joy, of unexpected reward.
SEAMUS HEANEY