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I suppose I'm saying that defiance is actually part of the lyric job
Seamus Heaney -
Between my finger and my thumb The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.
Seamus Heaney -
Poetry is language in orbit.
Seamus Heaney -
Sink every impulse like a bolt. Secure The bastion of sensation. Do not waver Into language. Do not waver in it.
Seamus Heaney -
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 -
Strange, it is a huge nothing that we fear.
Seamus Heaney
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No bit of the natural world is more valuable or more vulnerable than the tree bit. Nothing is more like ourselves, standing upright, caught between heaven and earth, frail at the extremities, yet strong at the central trunk, and nothing is closer to us at the beginning and at the end, providing the timber boards that frame both the cradle and the coffin.
Seamus Heaney -
It is always better to avenge dear ones than to indulge in mourning. For every one of us, living in this world means waiting for our end. Let whoever can win glory before death. When a warrior is gone, that will be his best and only bulwark.
Seamus Heaney -
The completely solitary self: that's where poetry comes from, and it gets isolated by crisis, and those crises are often very intimate also.
Seamus Heaney -
Wherever that man went, he went gratefully.
Seamus Heaney -
Anyone with gumption and a sharp mind will take the measure of two things: what's said and what's done.
Seamus Heaney -
Even if the last move did not succeed, the inner command says move again.
Seamus Heaney
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On the contrary, a trust in the staying power and travel-worthiness of such good should encourage us to credit the possibility of a world where respect for the validity of every tradition will issue in the creation and maintenance of a salubrious political space.
Seamus Heaney -
The next move is always the test.
Seamus Heaney -
I have begun to think of life as a series of ripples widening out from an original center.
Seamus Heaney -
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 -
Part of my gradual education of myself has been to think that there is a deep relationship between the nature of the creature and the worth of the art.
Seamus Heaney -
I shall gain glory or die.
Seamus Heaney
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It is difficult at times to repress the thought that history is about as instructive as an abattoir; that Tacitus was right and that peace is merely the desolation left behind after the decisive operations of merciless power.
Seamus Heaney -
I always believed that whatever had to be written would somehow get itself written.
Seamus Heaney -
The main thing is to write for the joy of it. Cultivate a work-lust that imagines its haven like your hands at night dreaming the sun in the sunspot of a breast. You are fasted now, light-headed, dangerous. Take off from here.
Seamus Heaney -
But even so, none of the news of these world-spasms entered me as terror.
Seamus Heaney