My father and mother had no sense of entitlement for their children.
SEAMUS HEANEYI have begun to think of life as a series of ripples widening out from an original center.
More Seamus Heaney Quotes
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History says, ‘Don’t hope on this side of the grave.’
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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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As a young poet, you need corroboration, and that’s what publication does.
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The group of writers I had grown up with in the ’60s – Derek Mahon, Michael Longley, James Simmons, John Hewitt, Paul Muldoon – formed a very necessary and self-sustaining group.
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I’ve been in the habit of helping people.
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I think the first little jolt I got was reading Gerard Manley Hopkins – I liked other poems… but Hopkins was kind of electric for me – he changed the rules with speech, and the whole intensity of the language was there and so on.
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The murder of Sean Brown hurt my soul.
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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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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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Your temperament is what you write with, but it’s also how you deal with the world.
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There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you.
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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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Without needing to be theoretically instructed, consciousness quickly realizes that it is the site of variously contending discourses.
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The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.
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My experience is that prose usually equals duty – last minute, overdue-deadline stuff or a panic lecture to be written.
SEAMUS HEANEY