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Best to say that once a poem is finished I trust it to make its way, and I trust readers will find their way to it and through it, if the thing has got itself rightly expressed.

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
Make
Poem
Finished
Reader
Trust
Best
Find
Rightly
Thing
Expressed
Way
Readers

More quotes by 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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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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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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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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The appointment [in Harvard] gave me economic safety, writerly support, and intellectual self-respectplus eight months to myself every year.
Seamus Heaney
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My body was braille for the creeping influences.
Seamus Heaney
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Suspect too much sweet talk but never close your mind.
Seamus Heaney
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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.
Seamus Heaney
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The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.
Seamus Heaney
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When I first encountered the name of the city of Stockholm, I little thought that I would ever visit it, never mind end up being welcomed to it as a guest of the Swedish Academy and the Nobel Foundation.
Seamus Heaney
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The way we are living, timorous or bold, will have been our life.
Seamus Heaney
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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.
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
Seamus Heaney
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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
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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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Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.
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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I have always thought of poems as stepping stones in one's own sense of oneself.
Seamus Heaney
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But even so, none of the news of these world-spasms entered me as terror.
Seamus Heaney
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Two buckets were easier carried than one. / I grew up in between.
Seamus Heaney