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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

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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
Fact
Arrival
Facts
Elevation
Matter
Arrivals
Thing
Vocation
Life
Miraculous
Unexpected
Poetry
Almost

More quotes by Seamus Heaney

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But even so, none of the news of these world-spasms entered me as terror.
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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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Harvard created wonderful conditions for me as a writerbut the writing was done, almost entirely, when I got home.
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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.
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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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I suppose I'm saying that defiance is actually part of the lyric job
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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.
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The whole relationship between a writer's spiritual/emotional condition and the kind of wordstuff and form-making that's going on in his work is an interesting one. When I was an undergraduate, there was a glib notion around that there was no reason to suppose a bad man could be a good writer.
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The end of art is peace.
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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.
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Poetry is language in orbit.
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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.
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I always believed that whatever had to be written would somehow get itself written.
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Behaviour that's admired is the path to power among people everywhere.
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I have always thought of poems as stepping stones in one's own sense of oneself.
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Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.
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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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Two buckets were easier carried than one. / I grew up in between.
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Best to say that once a poem is finished I trust it to make its way, and I trust readers will find their way to it and through it, if the thing has got itself rightly expressed.
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There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you.
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