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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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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
Make
Readers
Notes
Writers
Wary
Citizens
Sinners
Reader
Realism
Positive
Note
Sense
Sinner
Reality
Aesthetic
More quotes by Seamus Heaney
Once I was on the job, once I had got started, I felt safe enough, but the anticipation made me tense.
Seamus Heaney
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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Behaviour that's admired is the path to power among people everywhere.
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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.
Seamus Heaney
My body was braille for the creeping influences.
Seamus Heaney
Write whatever you like!
Seamus Heaney
On the contrary, a trust in the staying power and travel-worthiness of such good should encourage us to credit the possibility of a world where respect for the validity of every tradition will issue in the creation and maintenance of a salubrious political space.
Seamus Heaney
Loyalism, or Unionism, or Protestantism, or whatever you want to call it, in Northern Ireland - it operates not as a class system, but a caste system.
Seamus Heaney
But that citizen's perception was also at one with the truth in recognizing that the very brutality of the means by which the IRA were pursuing change was destructive of the trust upon which new possibilities would have to be based.
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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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I've always associated the moment of writing with a moment of lift, of joy, of unexpected reward.
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Suspect too much sweet talk but never close your mind.
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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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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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You had to come back to learn how to lose yourself, to be pilot and stray-witch, Hansel and Gretel in one.
Seamus Heaney
I always believed that whatever had to be written would somehow get itself written.
Seamus Heaney
The way we are living, timorous or bold, will have been our life.
Seamus Heaney
Between my finger and my thumb The squat pen rests snug as a gun. ~from the poem Digging
Seamus Heaney
Poetry is language in orbit.
Seamus Heaney
