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The gift of writing is to be self-forgetful... to get a surge of inner life or inner supply or unexpected sense of empowerment, to be afloat, to be out of yourself.

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
Self
Surge
Writing
Forgetful
Life
Empowerment
Supply
Unexpected
Inner
Gift
Sense
Afloat

More quotes by 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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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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Write whatever you like!
Seamus Heaney
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Poetry is language in orbit.
Seamus Heaney
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I suppose I did feel a certain public pressure always.
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.
Seamus Heaney
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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
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Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.
Seamus Heaney
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Walk on air against your better judgement.
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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I suppose I'm saying that defiance is actually part of the lyric job
Seamus Heaney
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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.
Seamus Heaney
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Two buckets were easier carried than one. / I grew up in between.
Seamus Heaney
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If you have the words, there's always a chance that you'll find the way.
Seamus Heaney
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The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.
Seamus Heaney
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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.
Seamus Heaney
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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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The way we are living, timorous or bold, will have been our life.
Seamus Heaney
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There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you.
Seamus Heaney
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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.
Seamus Heaney