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But even so, none of the news of these world-spasms entered me as terror.
Seamus Heaney -
The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.
Seamus Heaney
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The thing about writing is that if you have the impulse, you will find the time.
Seamus Heaney -
Not to Learn Irish is to miss the opportunity of understanding what life in this country has meant and could mean in a better future. It is to cut oneself off from ways of being at home. If we regard self-understanding, mutual understanding, imaginative enhancement, cultural diversity and a tolerant political atmosphereas a desirable attainments, we should remember that a knowledge of the Irish language is an essential element in their realisation.
Seamus Heaney -
History says, Don’t hope On this side of the grave, But then, once in a lifetime The longed-for tidal wave Of justice can rise up, And hope and history rhyme
Seamus Heaney -
Yet there are times when a deeper need enters, when we want the poem to be not only pleasurably right but compellingly wise, not only a surprising variation played upon the world, but a re-tuning of the world itself.
Seamus Heaney -
I have always thought of poems as stepping stones in one's own sense of oneself. Every now and again, you write a poem that gives you self-respect and steadies your going a little bit farther out in the stream. At the same time, you have to conjure the next stepping stone because the stream, we hope, keeps flowing.
Seamus Heaney -
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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You had to come back to learn how to lose yourself, to be pilot and stray-witch, Hansel and Gretel in one.
Seamus Heaney -
Behaviour that's admired is the path to power among people everywhere.
Seamus Heaney -
I rhyme… to see myself, to set the darkness echoing.
Seamus Heaney -
A writer is not different from a reader, in that the common ragbag of orthodoxies and assumptions is what a poet has to work with as well.
Seamus Heaney -
I credit poetry for making this space-walk possible.
Seamus Heaney -
There is not built-in meaning to anything, we are free to add any meaning we choose to give it.
Seamus Heaney
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Smile As you find a rhythm Working you, slow mile by mile, Into your proper haunt.
Seamus Heaney -
Debate doesn’t really change things. It gets you bogged in deeper. If you can address or reopen the subject with something new, something from a different angle, then there is some hope. ... People are suddenly gazing at something else and pausing for a moment. And for the duration of that gaze and pause, they are like reflectors of the totality of their own knowledge and/or ignorance. That’s something poetry can do for you, it can entrance you for a moment above the pool of your own consciousness and your own possibilities.
Seamus Heaney -
To begin with, I wanted that truth to life to possess a concrete reliability, and rejoiced most when the poem seemed most direct, an upfront representation of the world it stood in for or stood up for or stood its ground against.
Seamus Heaney -
It is difficult at times to repress the thought that history is about as instructive as an abattoir.
Seamus Heaney -
Harvard created wonderful conditions for me as a writerbut the writing was done, almost entirely, when I got home.
Seamus Heaney -
God is a foreman with certain definite views Who orders life in shifts of work and leisure.
Seamus Heaney
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One of the very first poems I wrote was Docker That fist would drop a hammer on a Catholic and one of the sturdiest was Requiem for the Croppies, written 50 years after 1916 the year of the Easter Rising. Being responsible and what it means, what it demands, have indeed preoccupied me maybe too much. But this is it, this is the thing, this is what you're up against.
Seamus Heaney -
I have always thought of poems as stepping stones in one's own sense of oneself.
Seamus Heaney -
I suppose I did feel a certain public pressure always.
Seamus Heaney -
Im a firm believer in learning by heart.
Seamus Heaney