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

Seamus Heaney

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Seamus Heaney
Age: 74 †
Born: 1939
Born: April 13
Died: 2013
Died: August 30
Actor
Author
Linguist
Playwright
Poet
Translator
University Teacher
Writer
Seamus Justin Heaney
Seamus Heaney
Always
Reward
Lifts
Unexpected
Rewards
Joy
Moment
Moments
Associated
Writing
Lift

More quotes by Seamus Heaney

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The end of art is peace.
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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.
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As writers and readers, as sinners and citizens, our realism and our aesthetic sense make us wary of crediting the positive note.
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At home in Ireland, there's a habit of avoidance, an ironical attitude towards the authority figure.
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A public expectation, it has to be said, not of poetry as such but of political positions variously approvable by mutually disapproving groups.
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Between my finger and my thumb The squat pen rests snug as a gun. ~from the poem Digging
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Wherever that man went, he went gratefully.
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The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.
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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.
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I have always thought of poems as stepping stones in one's own sense of oneself. Every now and again, you write a poem that gives you self-respect and steadies your going a little bit farther out in the stream. At the same time, you have to conjure the next stepping stone because the stream, we hope, keeps flowing.
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Behaviour that's admired is the path to power among people everywhere.
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Strange, it is a huge nothing that we fear.
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Even if the last move did not succeed, the inner command says move again.
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I suppose I'm saying that defiance is actually part of the lyric job
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Write whatever you like!
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So hope for a great sea-change on the far side of revenge. Believe that further shore is reachable from here. Believe in miracles and cures and healing wells.
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Once I was on the job, once I had got started, I felt safe enough, but the anticipation made me tense.
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Allow ourselves to do as Ram Dass said in his delicious phrase Be Here Now. If you are here now you cannot fall into falsely constructed gender projections.
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I suppose I did feel a certain public pressure always.
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In off the moors, down through the mist beams, god-cursed Grendel came greedily loping.
Seamus Heaney