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I have always thought of poems as stepping stones in one's own sense of oneself.

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
Stepping
Poems
Stones
Oneself
Sense
Thought
Always

More quotes by Seamus Heaney

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Even if the last move did not succeed, the inner command says move again.
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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.
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The dotted line my father's ashplant made On Sandymount Strand Is something else the tide won't wash away.
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If you have the words, there's always a chance that you'll find the way.
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I've nothing against the Queen personally: I had lunch at the Palace once upon a time.
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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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I have begun to think of life as a series of ripples widening out from an original center.
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The way we are living, timorous or bold, will have been our life.
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In off the moors, down through the mist beams, god-cursed Grendel came greedily loping.
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So hope for a great sea-change on the far side of revenge. Believe that further shore is reachable from here. Believe in miracles and cures and healing wells.
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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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Wherever that man went, he went gratefully.
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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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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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Write whatever you like!
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Strange, it is a huge nothing that we fear.
Seamus Heaney
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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.
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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.
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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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There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you.
Seamus Heaney