Home
Authors
Tags
App
Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App
" I've nothing against the Queen personally. I had lunch at the Palace once upon a time. "
Seamus Heaney
Time
Queen
Against
Related Quotes:
" I think of Dermot Healy as the heir to Patrick Kavanagh. "
Seamus Heaney
Think
Heir
I Think
" The day I entered St Columb's College, my parents bought me a Conway Stewart pen. It was a special afternoon, of course. We were going to be parting that evening; they were aware of it, I was aware of it, nothing much was said about it. "
Seamus Heaney
Evening
College
Day
" 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
" My experience is that prose usually equals duty - last minute, overdue-deadline stuff or a panic lecture to be written. "
Seamus Heaney
Panic
Last
Experience
" I don't think my intelligence is naturally analytic or political. "
Seamus Heaney
Analytic
Think
Political
" A public expectation, it has to be said, not of poetry as such but of political positions variously approvable by mutually disapproving groups. "
Seamus Heaney
Expectation
Said
Political
" One doesn't want one's identity coerced. "
Seamus Heaney
Want
Identity
" The kind of poet who founds and reconstitutes values is somebody like Yeats or Whitman - these are public value-founders. "
Seamus Heaney
Who
Somebody
Values
" Loyalism, or Unionism, or Protestantism, or whatever you want to call it, in Northern Ireland - it operates not as a class system, but a caste system. "
Seamus Heaney
You
Ireland
Caste
" Poetry is more a threshold than a path. "
Seamus Heaney
Threshold
More
Poetry
" Poetry is a domestic art, most itself when most at home. "
Seamus Heaney
Domestic
Most
Art
" I credit poetry for making this space-walk possible. "
Seamus Heaney
Poetry
Making
Credit
" My father was a creature of the archaic world, really. He would have been entirely at home in a Gaelic hill-fort. His side of the family, and the houses I associate with his side of the family, belonged to a traditional rural Ireland. "
Seamus Heaney
Side
Home
Been
" I suppose you inevitably fall into habits of expression. "
Seamus Heaney
Expression
You
Suppose
" Poetry is what we do to break bread with the dead. "
Seamus Heaney
Poetry
Bread
Break
" 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
" I always had a superstitious fear of setting up a too well-designed writing place and then finding that the writing had absconded. "
Seamus Heaney
Fear
Always
Writing
" I spend almost every morning with mail. "
Seamus Heaney
Every
Spend
Morning
" Manifesting that order of poetry where we can at last grow up to that which we stored up as we grew. "
Seamus Heaney
Up
Last
Order
" I've always associated the moment of writing with a moment of lift, of joy, of unexpected reward. "
Seamus Heaney
Reward
Joy
Writing
" Anybody serious about poetry knows how hard it is to achieve anything worthwhile in it. "
Seamus Heaney
Poetry
Hard
Anything
" I would say that something important for me and for my generation in Northern Ireland was the 1947 Education Act, which allowed students who won scholarships to go on to secondary schools and thence to university. "
Seamus Heaney
Generation
Important
Go
" 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
" As writers and readers, as sinners and citizens, our realism and our aesthetic sense make us wary of crediting the positive note. "
Seamus Heaney
Aesthetic
Us
Sense
" 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. "
Seamus Heaney
Reality
Language
Kind
" I suppose you could say my father's world was Thomas Hardy and my mother's D.H. Lawrence. "
Seamus Heaney
Thomas
You
World
" In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself. "
Seamus Heaney
Ring
Within
Truth
" The end of art is peace. "
Seamus Heaney
Art
Peace
End
" In the United States, in poetry workshops, it's now quite a thing to make graduate students learn poems by heart. "
Seamus Heaney
Heart
Students
Learn
" My father and mother had no sense of entitlement for their children. "
Seamus Heaney
No Sense
Mother
Had