Quote

Sink every impulse like a bolt. Secure The bastion of sensation. Do not waver Into language. Do not waver in it.

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
Sensation
Sink
Sensations
Impulse
Secure
Bastion
Language
Waver
Every
Bolt
Like
Bolts

More quotes by Seamus Heaney

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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.
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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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There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you.
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The next move is always the test.
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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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Walk on air against your better judgement.
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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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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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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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Between my finger and my thumb The squat pen rests snug as a gun. ~from the poem Digging
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Poetry is language in orbit.
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But even so, none of the news of these world-spasms entered me as terror.
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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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At home in Ireland, there's a habit of avoidance, an ironical attitude towards the authority figure.
Seamus Heaney
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Two buckets were easier carried than one. / I grew up in between.
Seamus Heaney
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Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.
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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've always associated the moment of writing with a moment of lift, of joy, of unexpected reward.
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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I rhyme… to see myself, to set the darkness echoing.
Seamus Heaney