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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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Seamus Heaney
Age: 74 †
Born: 1939
Born: April 13
Died: 2013
Died: August 30
Actor
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Seamus Justin Heaney
Seamus Heaney
Heels
Markings
Points
Bearings
Distance
Obstinacy
Taken
Cardinal
Self
Cardinals
Love
Stance
Options
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More quotes by Seamus Heaney
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
As writers and readers, as sinners and citizens, our realism and our aesthetic sense make us wary of crediting the positive note.
Seamus Heaney
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
The next move is always the test.
Seamus Heaney
I have always thought of poems as stepping stones in one's own sense of oneself.
Seamus Heaney
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.
Seamus Heaney
I rhyme… to see myself, to set the darkness echoing.
Seamus Heaney
I always believed that whatever had to be written would somehow get itself written.
Seamus Heaney
Between my finger and my thumb The squat pen rests snug as a gun. ~from the poem Digging
Seamus Heaney
Memory has always been fundamental for me. In fact, remembering what I had forgotten is the way most of the poems get started.
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.
Seamus Heaney
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
It has as much to do with the energy released by linguistic fission and fusion, with the buoyancy generated by cadence and tone and rhyme and stanza, as it has to do with the poem's concerns or the poet's truthfulness.
Seamus Heaney
I suppose I did feel a certain public pressure always.
Seamus Heaney
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
My body was braille for the creeping influences.
Seamus Heaney
I might enjoy being an albatross, being able to glide for days and daydream for hundreds of miles along the thermals. And then being able to hang like an affliction round some people's necks.
Seamus Heaney
Harvard created wonderful conditions for me as a writerbut the writing was done, almost entirely, when I got home.
Seamus Heaney
Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.
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