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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
Come
Stray
Pilot
Witch
Pilots
Lose
Loses
Learn
Gretel
Back
Hansel

More quotes by Seamus Heaney

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I suppose I'm saying that defiance is actually part of the lyric job
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Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.
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My point is there's a hidden Scotland in anyone who speaks the Northern Ireland speech. It's a terrific complicating factor, not just in Northern Ireland, but Ireland generally.
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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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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.
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I rhyme… to see myself, to set the darkness echoing.
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Suspect too much sweet talk but never close your mind.
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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.
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But even so, none of the news of these world-spasms entered me as terror.
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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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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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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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Walk on air against your better judgement.
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My body was braille for the creeping influences.
Seamus Heaney
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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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In off the moors, down through the mist beams, god-cursed Grendel came greedily loping.
Seamus Heaney
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I always believed that whatever had to be written would somehow get itself written.
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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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.
Seamus Heaney
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Believe that a further shore is reachable from here.
Seamus Heaney