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" A person from Northern Ireland is naturally cautious. "
Seamus Heaney
Naturally
Ireland
Cautious
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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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" When I first encountered the name of the city of Stockholm, I little thought that I would ever visit it, never mind end up being welcomed to it as a guest of the Swedish Academy and the Nobel Foundation. "
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" I've nothing against the Queen personally. I had lunch at the Palace once upon a time. "
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" Poetry is more a threshold than a path. "
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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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Old
Recognized
Road
" 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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Group
Michael
" 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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Reality
Language
Kind
" 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. "
Seamus Heaney
Point
Hidden
Speech
" The murder of Sean Brown hurt my soul. "
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Sean
Soul
Brown
" We go to poetry, we go to literature in general, to be forwarded within ourselves. "
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General
Go
Literature
" I came from a farming background, and my career was teaching. "
Seamus Heaney
Teaching
Farming
Career
" Tom Sleigh's poetry is hard-earned and well founded. I great admire the way it refuses to cut emotional corners and yet achieves a sense of lyric absolution. "
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Emotional
Poetry
Great
" History says, 'Don't hope on this side of the grave.' "
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History
Says
Side
" A public expectation, it has to be said, not of poetry as such but of political positions variously approvable by mutually disapproving groups. "
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Expectation
Said
Political
" 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. "
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Perception
Change
Trust
" If poetry and the arts do anything, they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness. "
Seamus Heaney
Anything
Your
Poetry
" In the United States, in poetry workshops, it's now quite a thing to make graduate students learn poems by heart. "
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Heart
Students
Learn
" The experimental poetry thing is not my thing. It's a programme of the avant-garde: basically a refusal of the kind of poetry I write. "
Seamus Heaney
Avant-Garde
Write
Thing
" The experiment of poetry, as far as I am concerned, happens when the poem carries you beyond where you could have reasonably expected to go. "
Seamus Heaney
Beyond
Go
I Am
" Poetry is what we do to break bread with the dead. "
Seamus Heaney
Poetry
Bread
Break
" 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. "
Seamus Heaney
Community
Myself
Moment
" Without needing to be theoretically instructed, consciousness quickly realizes that it is the site of variously contending discourses. "
Seamus Heaney
Site
Consciousness
Quickly
" Poems that come swiftly are usually the ones that you keep. "
Seamus Heaney
Swiftly
You
Keep
" At home in Ireland, there's a habit of avoidance, an ironical attitude towards the authority figure. "
Seamus Heaney
Authority
Figure
Habit
" In a way, Anglo-Saxon poetry cannot be translated. "
Seamus Heaney
Way
Cannot
Poetry
" The gift of writing is to be self-forgetful, to get a surge of inner life or inner supply or unexpected sense of empowerment, to be afloat, to be out of yourself. "
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Writing
Gift
Life
" Memory has always been fundamental for me. In fact, remembering what I had forgotten is the way most of the poems get started. "
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Always
Way
Remembering
" I think of the bog as a feminine goddess-ridden ground, rather like the territory of Ireland itself. "
Seamus Heaney
Ground
Ireland
Like
" I think that water is immediately interesting. It's just, as an element, it is full of life. It is associated with origin; it is bright - it reflects you. "
Seamus Heaney
You
Water
Interesting
" 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 Heaney
Culture
Brain
Body