Seamus Heaney Quotes
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Hope is not optimism, which expects things to turn out well, but something rooted in the conviction that there is good worth working for.
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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 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.
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The poems I did write there in Harvard include Alphabets the 1984 Phi Beta Kappa poem and A Sofa in the Forties. And, of course, the John Harvard poem for the 350th anniversary Villanelle for an Anniversary.
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Write whatever you like!
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If poetry and the arts do anything, they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness.
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In off the moors, down through the mist beams, god-cursed Grendel came greedily loping.
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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.
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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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Even though Helen Vendler wasn't on the Harvard faculty when I came first in 1979, she was a guardian spirit; Robert Fitzgerald gave me the use of his study in Pusey Library. Monroe and Brenda Engel kept open house, Bob and Jana Kiely made me at home in Adams House. Then, too, in 1979, Frank Bidart, whom Id met in Dublin after the death of Robert Lowell he was over seeing Caroline Blackwood Frank brought me into his circle of friends, including Robert Pinsky and Alan Williamson.
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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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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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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.
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Harvard meant a lot in my writing life from the beginning, even though I didnt actually do much composition on the spot.
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The most exhilarating for the writer and the reader, are gift-things-poems which arrive on their own energy, poems that in William Shakespeare's term "slip" from you.
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If you have the words, there's always a chance that you'll find the way.
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Don't be surprised if I demur, for, be advised my passport's green.
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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.
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The bogholes might be Atlantic seepage. The wet centre is bottomless.
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Getting started, keeping going, getting started again - in art and in life, it seems to me this is the essential rhythm not only of achievement but of survival, the ground of convinced action, the basis of self-esteem and the guarantee of credibility in your lives, credibility to yourselves as well as to others.
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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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Desmond O'Grady is one of the senior figures in Irish Literary life, exemplary in the way he has committed himself over the decades to the vocation of poetry and has lived selflessly for the art
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My teaching was animated by what I was reading and being excited by as a poet.