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" 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

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

" 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. "

" In my early teens, I acquired a kind of representative status: went on behalf of the family to wakes and funerals and so on. And I would be counted on as an adult contributor when it came to farm work - the hay in the summertime, for example. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" We go to poetry, we go to literature in general, to be forwarded within ourselves. "

Seamus Heaney

General

Literature

" Poetry is more a threshold than a path. "

Seamus Heaney

Threshold

Poetry

" Poetry is what we do to break bread with the dead. "

" 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. "

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

" 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

" You yourself don't have to be shaken by mortal danger in order to feel your mortality. "

" There's never going to be a united Ireland, you know. "

" I think of the bog as a feminine goddess-ridden ground, rather like the territory of Ireland itself. "

Seamus Heaney

Ground

Ireland

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" The Heaneys were aristocrats, in the sense that they took for granted a code of behavior that was given and unspoken. Argumentation, persuasion, speech itself, for God's sake, just seemed otiose and superfluous to them. "

" I spend almost every morning with mail. "

" The poet is on the side of undeceiving the world. "

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

" 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. "

" 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