"If self is a location, so is love: Bearings taken, markings, cardinal points, Options, obstinacies, dug heels, and distance, Here and there and now and then, a stance."
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Quote collection
Seamus Heaney quotes (page 3 of 6)
113 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself."
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"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."
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"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."
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"Behaviour that's admired is the path to power among people everywhere."
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"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."
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"The thing about writing is that if you have the impulse, you will find the time."
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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."
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"Between my finger and my thumb The squat pen rests; snug as a gun. ~from the poem "Digging"
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"I don't miss teaching. I'm learning to take my time for myself."
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"I credit poetry for making this space-walk possible."
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"As writers and readers, as sinners and citizens, our realism and our aesthetic sense make us wary of crediting the positive note."
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"When I was teaching, I gave a lot of my mind and anxiety to it. There was always something clenched and anxious in me until the classes were over."
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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."
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"Wherever that man went, he went gratefully."
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"Strange, it is a huge nothing that we fear."
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"I have always thought of poems as stepping stones in one's own sense of oneself."
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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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"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."
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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."
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