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

More quotes by Seamus Heaney

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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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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.
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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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Between my finger and my thumb The squat pen rests snug as a gun. ~from the poem Digging
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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
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My body was braille for the creeping influences.
Seamus Heaney
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Poetry is language in orbit.
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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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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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I have begun to think of life as a series of ripples widening out from an original center.
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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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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Now it’s high watermark and floodtide in the heart and time to go. The sea-nymphs in the spray will be the chorus now. What’s left to say? Suspect too much sweet-talk but never close your mind. It was a fortunate wind that blew me here. I leave half-ready to believe that a crippled trust might walk and the half-true rhyme is love.
Seamus Heaney
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Believe that a further shore is reachable from here.
Seamus Heaney
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The next move is always the test.
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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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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In off the moors, down through the mist beams, god-cursed Grendel came greedily loping.
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