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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. "

Seamus Heaney

London

Train

You

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" I believe we are put here to improve civilisation. "

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" 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. "

" The murder of Sean Brown hurt my soul. "

" Yeats was 18th-century oratory, almost. "

" 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. "

" Dylan Thomas is now as much a case history as a chapter in the history of poetry. "

" One doesn't want one's identity coerced. "

Seamus Heaney

Want

Identity

" I don't think my intelligence is naturally analytic or political. "

" There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you. "

" I always believed that whatever had to be written would somehow get itself written. "

" My experience is that prose usually equals duty - last minute, overdue-deadline stuff or a panic lecture to be written. "

" I've always associated the moment of writing with a moment of lift, of joy, of unexpected reward. "

" 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. "

" Anybody serious about poetry knows how hard it is to achieve anything worthwhile in it. "

" 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. "

" A person from Northern Ireland is naturally cautious. "

" Poems that come swiftly are usually the ones that you keep. "

" You can have Irish identity in the north and also have your Irish passport. "

" In the United States, in poetry workshops, it's now quite a thing to make graduate students learn poems by heart. "

" 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. "

Seamus Heaney

Small

Truth

" I have begun to think of life as a series of ripples widening out from an original center. "

" I've said it before about the Nobel Prize: it's like being struck by a more or less benign avalanche. It was unexpected, unlooked for, and extraordinary. "

" The end of art is peace. "

" I think childhood is, generally speaking, a preparation for disappointment. "

" 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. "

" I spend almost every morning with mail. "

" The kind of poet who founds and reconstitutes values is somebody like Yeats or Whitman - these are public value-founders. "

" I suppose you inevitably fall into habits of expression. "

" Eternal life can mean utter reverence for life itself. "