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" 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

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" 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. "

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" Then as the years went on and my listening became more deliberate, I would climb up on an arm of our big sofa to get my ear closer to the wireless speaker. "

Seamus Heaney

Climb

Big

" It's difficult to learn poems off by heart that don't rhyme. "

" I'm not personally obsessed with death. At a certain age, the light that you live in is inhabited by the shades - it 'tis. "

" 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 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. "

" Poetry is more a threshold than a path. "

Seamus Heaney

Threshold

Poetry

" 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. "

" If poetry and the arts do anything, they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness. "

" In Northern Ireland, helicopters are not usually used to promote poetry. "

" What I've said before, only half in joke, is that everybody in Ireland is famous. Or, maybe better, say everybody is familiar. "

" In poetry, everything can be faked but the intensity of utterance. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" Sonnet is about movement in a form. "

" 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. "

" The faking of feelings is a sin against the imagination. "

" I'm very conscious that people dear to me are alive in my imagination - poets in particular. "

Seamus Heaney

People

Alive