"Hope is not optimism, which expects things to turn out well, but something rooted in the conviction that there is good worth working for."
"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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Source: Seamus Heaney (2014). “Crediting Poetry: The Nobel Lecture”, p.10, Macmillan
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