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You had to come back to learn how to lose yourself, to be pilot and stray-witch, Hansel and Gretel in one.

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
Pilot
Witch
Pilots
Lose
Loses
Learn
Gretel
Back
Hansel
Come
Stray

More quotes by Seamus Heaney

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The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.
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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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I am not a playwright. A playwright would take Antigone and hit it a few clouts and knock it out of shape and restructure it. My versioning was strictly verbal.
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The end of art is peace.
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I suppose I did feel a certain public pressure always.
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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.
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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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The whole relationship between a writer's spiritual/emotional condition and the kind of wordstuff and form-making that's going on in his work is an interesting one. When I was an undergraduate, there was a glib notion around that there was no reason to suppose a bad man could be a good writer.
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It has as much to do with the energy released by linguistic fission and fusion, with the buoyancy generated by cadence and tone and rhyme and stanza, as it has to do with the poem's concerns or the poet's truthfulness.
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I always believed that whatever had to be written would somehow get itself written.
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Suspect too much sweet talk but never close your mind.
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Write whatever you like!
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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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Between my finger and my thumb The squat pen rests snug as a gun. ~from the poem Digging
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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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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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I rhyme… to see myself, to set the darkness echoing.
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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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I shall gain glory or die.
Seamus Heaney
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I drink to keep body and soul apart.
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