Quote

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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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
People
Rounds
Daydream
Miles
Glide
Along
Daydreaming
Days
Affliction
Enjoy
Necks
Able
Hundreds
Might
Hang
Like
Round
Albatross

More quotes by Seamus Heaney

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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.
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In off the moors, down through the mist beams, god-cursed Grendel came greedily loping.
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Once I was on the job, once I had got started, I felt safe enough, but the anticipation made me tense.
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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.
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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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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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A public expectation, it has to be said, not of poetry as such but of political positions variously approvable by mutually disapproving groups.
Seamus Heaney
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Once off the bush The fruit fermented, the sweet flesh would turn sour. I always felt like crying. It wasn't fair That all the lovely canfuls smelt of rot. Each year I hoped they'd keep, knew they would not. -Blackberry picking
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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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Even if the last move did not succeed, the inner command says move again.
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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At home in Ireland, there's a habit of avoidance, an ironical attitude towards the authority figure.
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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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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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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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
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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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The aim of poetry and the poet is finally to be of service, to ply the effort of the individual into the larger work of the community as a whole.
Seamus Heaney
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Believe that a further shore is reachable from here.
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