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All Quotes by author - Seamus Heaney
" Anybody serious about poetry knows how hard it is to achieve anything worthwhile in it. "
Poetry
Hard
Anything
" Anyone born and bred in Northern Ireland can't be too optimistic. "
Anyone
Too
Optimistic
" A person from Northern Ireland is naturally cautious. "
Naturally
Ireland
Cautious
" A public expectation, it has to be said, not of poetry as such but of political positions variously approvable by mutually disapproving groups. "
Expectation
Said
Political
" As a young poet, you need corroboration, and that's what publication does. "
Young
Need
Poet
" As writers and readers, as sinners and citizens, our realism and our aesthetic sense make us wary of crediting the positive note. "
Aesthetic
Us
Sense
" At home in Ireland, there's a habit of avoidance, an ironical attitude towards the authority figure. "
Authority
Figure
Habit
" 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. "
Perception
Change
Trust
" Dylan Thomas is now as much a case history as a chapter in the history of poetry. "
Chapter
History
Much
" Eternal life can mean utter reverence for life itself. "
Eternal Life
Mean
Reverence
" Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained. "
You
Even
Hope
" Even if the last move did not succeed, the inner command says move again. "
Move
Succeed
Inner
" 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. "
Time
Eye
Reading
" History says, 'Don't hope on this side of the grave.' "
History
Says
Side
" I always believed that whatever had to be written would somehow get itself written. "
Would
Whatever
Had
" I always had a superstitious fear of setting up a too well-designed writing place and then finding that the writing had absconded. "
Fear
Always
Writing
" I believe we are put here to improve civilisation. "
Believe
Put
I Believe
" I came from a farming background, and my career was teaching. "
Teaching
Farming
Career
" I credit poetry for making this space-walk possible. "
Poetry
Making
Credit
" I don't do as many readings as I used to. There was a time when I was on the road a lot more, at home in Ireland, in Britain, in Canada and the States, a time when I had more stamina and appetite for it. "
Used
Road
Time
" I don't think my intelligence is naturally analytic or political. "
Analytic
Think
Political
" I feel myself part of something. Not only being part of a community but part of an actual moment and a movement of Irish writing and art. That sense of being part of the whole thing is the deepest joy. "
Community
Myself
Moment
" If poetry and the arts do anything, they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness. "
Anything
Your
Poetry
" 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. "
London
Train
You
" I have always thought of poems as stepping stones in one's own sense of oneself. Every now and again, you write a poem that gives you self-respect and steadies your going a little bit farther out in the stream. At the same time, you have to conjure the next stepping stone because the stream, we hope, keeps flowing. "
Hope
Time
Thought
" I have begun to think of life as a series of ripples widening out from an original center. "
Center
Think
Original
" I'm a firm believer in learning by heart. "
Learning
Heart
Firm Believer
" I'm not personally obsessed with death. At a certain age, the light that you live in is inhabited by the shades - it 'tis. "
Shades
Light
Live
" I'm very conscious that people dear to me are alive in my imagination - poets in particular. "
Me
People
Alive
" In a war situation or where violence and injustice are prevalent, poetry is called upon to be something more than a thing of beauty. "
War
Poetry
Violence
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