"I always believed that whatever had to be written would somehow get itself written."
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Quote collection
Seamus Heaney quotes (page 4 of 6)
113 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"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."
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"The fact of the matter is that the most unexpected and miraculous thing in my life was the arrival in it of poetry itself - as a vocation and an elevation almost."
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"Whether it be a matter of personal relations within a marriage or political initiatives within a peace process, there is no sure-fire do-it-yourself kit."
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"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."
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"Then as the years went on and my listening became more deliberate, I would climb up on an arm of our big sofa to get my ear closer to the wireless speaker."
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"It has as much to do with the energy released by linguistic fission and fusion, with the buoyancy generated by cadence and tone and rhyme and stanza, as it has to do with the poem's concerns or the poet's truthfulness."
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"The completely solitary self: that's where poetry comes from, and it gets isolated by crisis, and those crises are often very intimate also."
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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."
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"A public expectation, it has to be said, not of poetry as such but of political positions variously approvable by mutually disapproving groups."
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"Poetry is language in orbit."
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"There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you."
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"If self is a location, so is love."
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"The gift of writing is to be self-forgetful..."
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"Write whatever you like!"
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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."
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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 even so, none of the news of these world-spasms entered me as terror."
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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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"Im a firm believer in learning by heart."
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