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

More quotes by Seamus Heaney

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The completely solitary self: that's where poetry comes from, and it gets isolated by crisis, and those crises are often very intimate also.
Seamus Heaney
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Even if the last move did not succeed, the inner command says move again.
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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Between my finger and my thumb The squat pen rests snug as a gun. ~from the poem Digging
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Suspect too much sweet talk but never close your mind.
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I suppose I'm saying that defiance is actually part of the lyric job
Seamus Heaney
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Write whatever you like!
Seamus Heaney
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I suppose I did feel a certain public pressure always.
Seamus Heaney
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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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As writers and readers, as sinners and citizens, our realism and our aesthetic sense make us wary of crediting the positive note.
Seamus Heaney
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Wherever that man went, he went gratefully.
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I have always thought of poems as stepping stones in one's own sense of oneself.
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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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The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.
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.
Seamus Heaney
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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.
Seamus Heaney
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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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Believe that a further shore is reachable from here.
Seamus Heaney
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In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself.
Seamus Heaney