Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" 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. "

Related Quotes:

" 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. "

Seamus Heaney

Time

Eye

Reading

" Whether it be a matter of personal relations within a marriage or political initiatives within a peace process, there is no sure-fire do-it-yourself kit. "

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

" I came from a farming background, and my career was teaching. "

" One of the best descriptions of the type of writer I am was given by Tom Paulin, who described himself as a 'binge' writer - like a binge drinker. I go on binges. "

Seamus Heaney

Writer

Who

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

" My passport's green. "

Seamus Heaney

Green

Passport

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

" 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. "

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

" I've been in the habit of helping people. "

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

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

" The completely solitary self: that's where poetry comes from, and it gets isolated by crisis, and those crises are often very intimate also. "

" In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself. "

" The murder of Sean Brown hurt my soul. "

" To encounter 'Beowulf' is like taking a sledgehammer to a quarry face. You must bang in there. "

Seamus Heaney

Face

You

" 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

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

Seamus Heaney

People

Alive

" I'm a firm believer in learning by heart. "

" Without needing to be theoretically instructed, consciousness quickly realizes that it is the site of variously contending discourses. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Even if the last move did not succeed, the inner command says move again. "

" I always had a superstitious fear of setting up a too well-designed writing place and then finding that the writing had absconded. "

" 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

I Am

" Nowadays, what an award gives is a sense of solidarity with the poetry guild, as it were: sustenance coming from the assent of your peers on the judging panel. "

" Manifesting that order of poetry where we can at last grow up to that which we stored up as we grew. "

Seamus Heaney

Last

Order

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