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.
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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Since I was a schoolboy, I’ve been used to being recognized on the road by old and young, and being bantered with and, indeed, being taunted.
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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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I always had a superstitious fear of setting up a too well-designed writing place and then finding that the writing had absconded.
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The poet is on the side of undeceiving the world.
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Poems that come swiftly are usually the ones that you keep.
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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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I’m not personally obsessed with death. At a certain age, the light that you live in is inhabited by the shades – it ’tis.
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The Heaneys were aristocrats, in the sense that they took for granted a code of behavior that was given and unspoken. Argumentation, persuasion, speech itself, for God’s sake, just seemed otiose and superfluous to them.
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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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Anybody serious about poetry knows how hard it is to achieve anything worthwhile in it.
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My point is there’s a hidden Scotland in anyone who speaks the Northern Ireland speech. It’s a terrific complicating factor, not just in Northern Ireland, but Ireland generally.
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Even if the last move did not succeed, the inner command says move again.
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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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There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you.
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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.
SEAMUS HEANEY