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The completely solitary self: that's where poetry comes from, and it gets isolated by crisis, and those crises are often very intimate also.

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
Gets
Often
Crises
Solitary
Comes
Isolated
Also
Intimate
Self
Crisis
Completely
Poetry

More quotes by Seamus Heaney

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Once off the bush The fruit fermented, the sweet flesh would turn sour. I always felt like crying. It wasn't fair That all the lovely canfuls smelt of rot. Each year I hoped they'd keep, knew they would not. -Blackberry picking
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The end of art is peace.
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.
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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.
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The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.
Seamus Heaney
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Two buckets were easier carried than one. / I grew up in between.
Seamus Heaney
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Poetry is language in orbit.
Seamus Heaney
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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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As writers and readers, as sinners and citizens, our realism and our aesthetic sense make us wary of crediting the positive note.
Seamus Heaney
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The next move is always the test.
Seamus Heaney
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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.
Seamus Heaney
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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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A public expectation, it has to be said, not of poetry as such but of political positions variously approvable by mutually disapproving groups.
Seamus Heaney
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I can't think of a case where poems changed the world, but what they do is they change people's understanding of what's going on in the world.
Seamus Heaney
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Suspect too much sweet talk but never close your mind.
Seamus Heaney
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I suppose I did feel a certain public pressure always.
Seamus Heaney
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Wherever that man went, he went gratefully.
Seamus Heaney
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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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The dotted line my father's ashplant made On Sandymount Strand Is something else the tide won't wash away.
Seamus Heaney
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If you have the words, there's always a chance that you'll find the way.
Seamus Heaney