The faking of feelings is a sin against the imagination.
SEAMUS HEANEYI would say that something important for me and for my generation in Northern Ireland was the 1947 Education Act, which allowed students who won scholarships to go on to secondary schools and thence to university.
More Seamus Heaney Quotes
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Anyone born and bred in Northern Ireland can’t be too optimistic.
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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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We go to poetry, we go to literature in general, to be forwarded within ourselves.
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Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.
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Sonnet is about movement in a form.
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I don’t think my intelligence is naturally analytic or political.
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I’ve always associated the moment of writing with a moment of lift, of joy, of unexpected reward.
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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.
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History says, ‘Don’t hope on this side of the grave.’
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I think of Dermot Healy as the heir to Patrick Kavanagh.
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I’m very conscious that people dear to me are alive in my imagination – poets in particular.
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Anybody serious about poetry knows how hard it is to achieve anything worthwhile in it.
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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 spend almost every morning with mail.
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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.
SEAMUS HEANEY