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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
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Playwright
Poet
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University Teacher
Writer
Seamus Justin Heaney
Seamus Heaney
Poems
Stones
Oneself
Sense
Thought
Always
Stepping
More quotes by Seamus Heaney
I have always thought of poems as stepping stones in one's own sense of oneself. Every now and again, you write a poem that gives you self-respect and steadies your going a little bit farther out in the stream. At the same time, you have to conjure the next stepping stone because the stream, we hope, keeps flowing.
Seamus Heaney
Harvard created wonderful conditions for me as a writerbut the writing was done, almost entirely, when I got home.
Seamus Heaney
Walk on air against your better judgement.
Seamus Heaney
I rhyme… to see myself, to set the darkness echoing.
Seamus Heaney
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
I always believed that whatever had to be written would somehow get itself written.
Seamus Heaney
Behaviour that's admired is the path to power among people everywhere.
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
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
There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you.
Seamus Heaney
My body was braille for the creeping influences.
Seamus Heaney
Between my finger and my thumb The squat pen rests snug as a gun. ~from the poem Digging
Seamus Heaney
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
Write whatever you like!
Seamus Heaney
If you have the words, there's always a chance that you'll find the way.
Seamus Heaney
Believe that a further shore is reachable from here.
Seamus Heaney
Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.
Seamus Heaney
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
I've always associated the moment of writing with a moment of lift, of joy, of unexpected reward.
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.
Seamus Heaney