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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
Author
Linguist
Playwright
Poet
Translator
University Teacher
Writer
Seamus Justin Heaney
Seamus Heaney
Options
Location
Heels
Markings
Points
Bearings
Distance
Obstinacy
Taken
Cardinal
Self
Cardinals
Love
Stance

More quotes by Seamus Heaney

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I suppose I'm saying that defiance is actually part of the lyric job
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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.
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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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But even so, none of the news of these world-spasms entered me as terror.
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I suppose I did feel a certain public pressure always.
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I always believed that whatever had to be written would somehow get itself written.
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Two buckets were easier carried than one. / I grew up in between.
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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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The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.
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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.
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The next move is always the test.
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My point is there's a hidden Scotland in anyone who speaks the Northern Ireland speech. It's a terrific complicating factor, not just in Northern Ireland, but Ireland generally.
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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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I have always thought of poems as stepping stones in one's own sense of oneself.
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Memory has always been fundamental for me. In fact, remembering what I had forgotten is the way most of the poems get started.
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I am not a playwright. A playwright would take Antigone and hit it a few clouts and knock it out of shape and restructure it. My versioning was strictly verbal.
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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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Between my finger and my thumb The squat pen rests snug as a gun. ~from the poem Digging
Seamus Heaney
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Walk on air against your better judgement.
Seamus Heaney
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Irish readers, British readers, American readers: is it odd that I haven't a clue about how differently they react? Or better say, I cannot find the words to describe my hunch about them.
Seamus Heaney