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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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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
Rests
Digging
Finger
Pens
Poem
Snug
Gun
Squat
Fingers
Thumb
Thumbs
More quotes by 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.
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In off the moors, down through the mist beams, god-cursed Grendel came greedily loping.
Seamus Heaney
At home in Ireland, there's a habit of avoidance, an ironical attitude towards the authority figure.
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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.
Seamus Heaney
Then as the years went on and my listening became more deliberate, I would climb up on an arm of our big sofa to get my ear closer to the wireless speaker.
Seamus Heaney
I have begun to think of life as a series of ripples widening out from an original center.
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
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
Allow ourselves to do as Ram Dass said in his delicious phrase Be Here Now. If you are here now you cannot fall into falsely constructed gender projections.
Seamus Heaney
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
I always believed that whatever had to be written would somehow get itself written.
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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.
Seamus Heaney
I've always associated the moment of writing with a moment of lift, of joy, of unexpected reward.
Seamus Heaney
I rhyme… to see myself, to set the darkness echoing.
Seamus Heaney
Suspect too much sweet talk but never close your mind.
Seamus Heaney
My body was braille for the creeping influences.
Seamus Heaney
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
There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you.
Seamus Heaney
Poetry is language in orbit.
Seamus Heaney
But that citizen's perception was also at one with the truth in recognizing that the very brutality of the means by which the IRA were pursuing change was destructive of the trust upon which new possibilities would have to be based.
Seamus Heaney
