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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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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
Contemporaries
Inhabit
Irish
Ireland
Helped
Imagine

More quotes by 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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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 have begun to think of life as a series of ripples widening out from an original center.
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The next move is always the test.
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The gift of writing is to be self-forgetful... to get a surge of inner life or inner supply or unexpected sense of empowerment, to be afloat, to be out of yourself.
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I have always thought of poems as stepping stones in one's own sense of oneself.
Seamus Heaney
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I always believed that whatever had to be written would somehow get itself written.
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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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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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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In off the moors, down through the mist beams, god-cursed Grendel came greedily loping.
Seamus Heaney
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I have always thought of poems as stepping stones in one's own sense of oneself. Every now and again, you write a poem that gives you self-respect and steadies your going a little bit farther out in the stream. At the same time, you have to conjure the next stepping stone because the stream, we hope, keeps flowing.
Seamus Heaney
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Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.
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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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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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
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If you have the words, there's always a chance that you'll find the way.
Seamus Heaney
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Between my finger and my thumb The squat pen rests snug as a gun. ~from the poem Digging
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
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