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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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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
Series
Think
Widening
Thinking
Ripples
Life
Ripple
Begun
Center
Originals
Original

More quotes by 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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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.
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In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself.
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The end of art is peace.
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Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.
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Write whatever you like!
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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.
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I've nothing against the Queen personally: I had lunch at the Palace once upon a time.
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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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The way we are living, timorous or bold, will have been our life.
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The dotted line my father's ashplant made On Sandymount Strand Is something else the tide won't wash away.
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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.
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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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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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I suppose I'm saying that defiance is actually part of the lyric job
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Anything Can Happen is also, incidentally, a poem that arose from teaching. I'd talked about the Horace Ode (I, 34) [on which the poem is based] in a lecture I gave at Harvard in the fall of 2000 entitled Bright Boltsand remembered it after the Twin Towers attack.
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I shall gain glory or die.
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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.
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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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I always believed that whatever had to be written would somehow get itself written.
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