Seamus Heaney Zitate auf Englisch

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Write whatever you like!

Seamus Heaney

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

Seamus Heaney

The fact of the matter is that the most unexpected and miraculous thing in my life was the arrival in it of poetry itself - as a vocation and an elevation almost.

Seamus Heaney

I credit poetry for making this space-walk possible.

Seamus Heaney

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

Seamus Heaney

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.

Seamus Heaney

Your temperament is what you write with, but it's also how you deal with the world.

Seamus Heaney

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

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

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.

Seamus Heaney

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

Seamus Heaney

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

Seamus Heaney

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

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

As writers and readers, as sinners and citizens, our realism and our aesthetic sense make us wary of crediting the positive note.

Seamus Heaney

I spend almost every morning with mail.

Seamus Heaney

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

Seamus Heaney

My father was a creature of the archaic world, really. He would have been entirely at home in a Gaelic hill-fort. His side of the family, and the houses I associate with his side of the family, belonged to a traditional rural Ireland.

Seamus Heaney

I've been in the habit of helping people.

Seamus Heaney

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

The problem as you get older... is that you become more self-aware. At the same time, you have to surprise yourself. There's no way of arranging the surprise, so it is tricky.

Seamus Heaney

I'm a firm believer in learning by heart.

Seamus Heaney

Eternal life can mean utter reverence for life itself.

Seamus Heaney

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

Seamus Heaney

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.

Seamus Heaney

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

My passport's green.

Seamus Heaney

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

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

Seamus Heaney

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

Seamus Heaney

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.

Seamus Heaney

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

Seamus Heaney

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

Seamus Heaney