"Hope is not optimism, which expects things to turn out well, but something rooted in the conviction that there is good worth working for."
"Nowadays, what an award gives is a sense of solidarity with the poetry guild, as it were: sustenance coming from the assent of your peers on the judging panel."
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Source: Seamus Heaney (2014). “Opened Ground: Selected Poems, 1966-1996”, p.429, Macmillan
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"Believe that a further shore is reachable from here."
"Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained."
"Anyone with gumption and a sharp mind will take the measure of two things: what's said and what's done."
"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."
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