Seamus Heaney Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
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“Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.”
-- Seamus Heaney -
“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.”
-- Seamus Heaney -
“Anyone with gumption and a sharp mind will take the measure of two things: what's said and what's done.”
-- Seamus HeaneySource : Seamus Heaney (2009). “Beowulf”, p.30, Faber & Faber
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“If you have the words, there's always a chance that you'll find the way.”
-- Seamus Heaney -
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“Poetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to it.”
-- Seamus Heaney -
“The end of art is peace.”
-- Seamus HeaneySource : Seamus Heaney (2014). “Preoccupations: Selected Prose, 1968-1978”, p.112, Macmillan
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“All I know is a door into the dark”
-- Seamus HeaneySource : Seamus Heaney (2014). “Opened Ground: Selected Poems, 1966-1996”, p.437, Farrar, Straus and Giroux
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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've always associated the moment of writing with a moment of lift, of joy, of unexpected reward.”
-- Seamus Heaney -
“Two buckets were easier carried than one. / I grew up in between.”
-- Seamus Heaney -
“Walk on air against your better judgement.”
-- Seamus HeaneySource : Seamus Heaney (2014). “Opened Ground: Selected Poems, 1966-1996”, p.417, Macmillan
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“I have begun to think of life as a series of ripples widening out from an original center.”
-- Seamus Heaney -
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“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 -
“The ability to start out upon your own impulse is fundamental to the gift of keeping going upon your own terms. . . . Getting started, keeping going, getting started again in art and in life, it seems to me this is the essential rhythm.”
-- Seamus Heaney -
“I always believed that whatever had to be written would somehow get itself written.”
-- Seamus Heaney -
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“I rhyme… to see myself, to set the darkness echoing.”
-- Seamus Heaney -
“Even if the last move did not succeed, the inner command says move again.”
-- Seamus Heaney -
“Strange, it is a huge nothing that we fear.”
-- Seamus Heaney -
“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.”
-- Seamus Heaney -
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“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 -
“As writers and readers, as sinners and citizens, our realism and our aesthetic sense make us wary of crediting the positive note.”
-- Seamus Heaney -
“Believe that a further shore...is reachable from here.”
-- Seamus Heaney -
“The thing about writing is that if you have the impulse, you will find the time.”
-- Seamus Heaney -
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“The gift of writing is to be self-forgetful”
-- Seamus Heaney -
“I credit poetry for making this space-walk possible.”
-- Seamus Heaney -
“The way we are living, timorous or bold, will have been our life.”
-- Seamus HeaneySource : Seamus Heaney (2014). “Field Work: Poems”, p.23, Macmillan
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“Without needing to be theoretically instructed, consciousness quickly realizes that it is the site of variously contending discourses.”
-- Seamus Heaney -
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“Sink every impulse like a bolt. Secure The bastion of sensation. Do not waver Into language. Do not waver in it.”
-- Seamus Heaney -
“There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you.”
-- Seamus Heaney
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