If poetry and the arts do anything, they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness.
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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I came from a farming background, and my career was teaching.
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I think of Dermot Healy as the heir to Patrick Kavanagh.
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Nowadays, what an award gives is a sense of solidarity with the poetry guild, as it were: sustenance coming from the assent of your peers on the judging panel.
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In my early teens, I acquired a kind of representative status: went on behalf of the family to wakes and funerals and so on. And I would be counted on as an adult contributor when it came to farm work – the hay in the summertime, for example.
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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’ve always associated the moment of writing with a moment of lift, of joy, of unexpected reward.
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In poetry, everything can be faked but the intensity of utterance.
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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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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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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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The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.
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Eternal life can mean utter reverence for life itself.
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It is very true to say that work done by writers is quite often an attempt to give solid expression to that which is bothering them. They feel they have got it right if they express the stress.
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The kinds of truth that art gives us many, many times are small truths. They don’t have the resonance of an encyclical from the Pope stating an eternal truth, but they partake of the quality of eternity. There is a sort of timeless delight in them.
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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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