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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
Moments
Associated
Writing
Lift
Always
Reward
Lifts
Unexpected
Rewards
Joy
Moment

More quotes by Seamus Heaney

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Irish readers, British readers, American readers: is it odd that I haven't a clue about how differently they react? Or better say, I cannot find the words to describe my hunch about them.
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Poetry is language in orbit.
Seamus Heaney
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The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.
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If self is a location, so is love: Bearings taken, markings, cardinal points, Options, obstinacies, dug heels, and distance, Here and there and now and then, a stance.
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You had to come back to learn how to lose yourself, to be pilot and stray-witch, Hansel and Gretel in one.
Seamus Heaney
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Write whatever you like!
Seamus Heaney
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Harvard created wonderful conditions for me as a writerbut the writing was done, almost entirely, when I got home.
Seamus Heaney
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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.
Seamus Heaney
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I have begun to think of life as a series of ripples widening out from an original center.
Seamus Heaney
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Sink every impulse like a bolt. Secure The bastion of sensation. Do not waver Into language. Do not waver in it.
Seamus Heaney
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I am not a playwright. A playwright would take Antigone and hit it a few clouts and knock it out of shape and restructure it. My versioning was strictly verbal.
Seamus Heaney
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I've nothing against the Queen personally: I had lunch at the Palace once upon a time.
Seamus Heaney
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In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself.
Seamus Heaney
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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
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I rhyme… to see myself, to set the darkness echoing.
Seamus Heaney
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The aim of poetry and the poet is finally to be of service, to ply the effort of the individual into the larger work of the community as a whole.
Seamus Heaney
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Yet there are times when a deeper need enters, when we want the poem to be not only pleasurably right but compellingly wise, not only a surprising variation played upon the world, but a re-tuning of the world itself.
Seamus Heaney
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The way we are living, timorous or bold, will have been our life.
Seamus Heaney
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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
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Poetry cannot afford to lose its fundamentally self-delighting inventiveness, its joy in being a process of language as well as a representation of things in the world.
Seamus Heaney