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"The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine."
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"If Ireland is to become a new Ireland she must first become European."
"So I am getting a little bored with defining one type of film as American and the other European or from somewhere else because the division is no longer true."
"If nationality is consent, the state is compulsion."
"It's best to keep America just like that, always in the background, a sort of picture post card which you look at in a weak moment. Like that, you imagine it's always there waiting for you, unchanged, unspoiled, a big patriotic open space with cows and sheep and tenderhearted men ready to bugger everything in sight, man, woman or beast. It doesn't exist, America. It's a name you give to an abstract idea."
"We were very happy when a South African court, which had previously ruled against us, took another look and decided that this material was not obscene and allowed it into the country."
"Every color I can think of and nationality, we were all touched by Dr. King because he made us like each other and respect each other."
"I raised frogs every spring in our house from tadpoles and by end of summer our house was overrun with frogs."
"There is one day that is ours. Thanksgiving Day is the one day that is purely American."
"The English race is the best at weeping and the worst at laughing."
"Bohemia is nothing more than the little country in which you do not live. If you try to obtain citizenship in it, at once the court and retinue pack the royal archives and treasure and move away beyond the hills."
Explore more quotes by Seamus Heaney
"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."
"The completely solitary self: that's where poetry comes from, and it gets isolated by crisis, and those crises are often very intimate also."
"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."
"As writers and readers, as sinners and citizens, our realism and our aesthetic sense make us wary of crediting the positive note."
"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."
"In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself."
"A public expectation, it has to be said, not of poetry as such but of political positions variously approvable by mutually disapproving groups."
"At home in Ireland, there's a habit of avoidance, an ironical attitude towards the authority figure."
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