Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" 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

Related Quotes:

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" Tom Sleigh's poetry is hard-earned and well founded. I great admire the way it refuses to cut emotional corners and yet achieves a sense of lyric absolution. "

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

" Anyone born and bred in Northern Ireland can't be too optimistic. "

" Poetry is a domestic art, most itself when most at home. "

" 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

" Memory has always been fundamental for me. In fact, remembering what I had forgotten is the way most of the poems get started. "

" I think of Dermot Healy as the heir to Patrick Kavanagh. "

" The gift of writing is to be self-forgetful, to get a surge of inner life or inner supply or unexpected sense of empowerment, to be afloat, to be out of yourself. "

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

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

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

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

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

" The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine. "

" 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. "

" The end of art is peace. "

" Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained. "

" A person from Northern Ireland is naturally cautious. "

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

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

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

" 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

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

" 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. "

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

Seamus Heaney

People

Alive