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" Write whatever you like! "
Seamus Heaney
Whatever
You
Write
Related Quotes:
" There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you. "
Seamus Heaney
Truth
Risk
World
" 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. "
Seamus Heaney
Writing
Gift
Life
" I don't do as many readings as I used to. There was a time when I was on the road a lot more, at home in Ireland, in Britain, in Canada and the States, a time when I had more stamina and appetite for it. "
Seamus Heaney
Used
Road
Time
" 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. "
Seamus Heaney
Emotional
Poetry
Great
" Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained. "
Seamus Heaney
You
Even
Hope
" The poet is on the side of undeceiving the world. "
Seamus Heaney
Poet
World
Side
" The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine. "
Seamus Heaney
Irish
Helped
Ireland
" 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. "
Seamus Heaney
Behavior
Speech
Persuasion
" I've always associated the moment of writing with a moment of lift, of joy, of unexpected reward. "
Seamus Heaney
Reward
Joy
Writing
" 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
" The end of art is peace. "
Seamus Heaney
Art
Peace
End
" In poetry, everything can be faked but the intensity of utterance. "
Seamus Heaney
Poetry
Intensity
Everything
" I think of Dermot Healy as the heir to Patrick Kavanagh. "
Seamus Heaney
Think
Heir
I Think
" Poetry is a domestic art, most itself when most at home. "
Seamus Heaney
Domestic
Most
Art
" 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 spend almost every morning with mail. "
Seamus Heaney
Every
Spend
Morning
" 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
Us
" 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. "
Seamus Heaney
Extraordinary
Unexpected
Said
" I suppose you could say my father's world was Thomas Hardy and my mother's D.H. Lawrence. "
Seamus Heaney
Thomas
You
World
" I came from a farming background, and my career was teaching. "
Seamus Heaney
Teaching
Farming
Career
" 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
" You can have Irish identity in the north and also have your Irish passport. "
Seamus Heaney
Irish
Identity
You
" Poetry is more a threshold than a path. "
Seamus Heaney
Threshold
More
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. "
Seamus Heaney
Process
Kit
Marriage
" 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. "
Seamus Heaney
You
Water
Interesting
" 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. "
Seamus Heaney
Perception
Change
Trust
" I always believed that whatever had to be written would somehow get itself written. "
Seamus Heaney
Would
Whatever
Had
" 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. "
Seamus Heaney
Solidarity
Judging
Poetry
" I'm very conscious that people dear to me are alive in my imagination - poets in particular. "
Seamus Heaney
Me
People
Alive
" Memory has always been fundamental for me. In fact, remembering what I had forgotten is the way most of the poems get started. "
Seamus Heaney
Always
Way
Remembering