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In off the moors, down through the mist beams, god-cursed Grendel came greedily loping.


Seamus Heaney

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SEAMUS HEANEY But the thing uttered by the speaker I strain towards is still not quite the story of what is going ...
SEAMUS HEANEY Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.
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is the path to power among people everywhere.
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Those who pray have no time to stray.
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�...
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More Seamus Heaney

Anyone born and bred in Northern Ireland can't be too optimistic.
SEAMUS HEANEY words...To lure the tribal shoals to epigram / And order.
SEAMUS HEANEY Every time you read a poem aloud to yourself in the presence of others, you are reading it into your...
SEAMUS HEANEY The gift of writing is to be self-forgetful, to get a surge of inner life or inner supply or unexpec...
SEAMUS HEANEY Loyalism, or Unionism, or Protestantism, or whatever you want to call it, in Northern Ireland - it o...
SEAMUS HEANEY One of the best descriptions of the type of writer I am was given by Tom Paulin, who described himse...
SEAMUS HEANEY Nowadays, what an award gives is a sense of solidarity with the poetry guild, as it were: sustenance...
SEAMUS HEANEY The fact of the matter is that the most unexpected and miraculous thing in my life was the arrival i...
SEAMUS HEANEY The problem as you get older... is that you become more self-aware. At the same time, you have to su...
SEAMUS HEANEY The Heaneys were aristocrats, in the sense that they took for granted a code of behavior that was gi...
SEAMUS HEANEY My father was a creature of the archaic world, really. He would have been entirely at home in a Gael...
SEAMUS HEANEY I've said it before about the Nobel Prize: it's like being struck by a more or less benign a...
SEAMUS HEANEY In a way, Anglo-Saxon poetry cannot be translated.
SEAMUS HEANEY I don't think my intelligence is naturally analytic or political.
SEAMUS HEANEY Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.
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SEAMUS HEANEY A public expectation, it has to be said, not of poetry as such but of political positions variously ...
SEAMUS HEANEY Then as the years went on and my listening became more deliberate, I would climb up on an arm of our...
SEAMUS HEANEY Dylan Thomas is now as much a case history as a chapter in the history of poetry.
SEAMUS HEANEY If you have the words, there's always a chance that you'll find the way.
SEAMUS HEANEY In the United States, in poetry workshops, it's now quite a thing to make graduate students lear...
SEAMUS HEANEY The faking of feelings is a sin against the imagination.
SEAMUS HEANEY If poetry and the arts do anything, they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness.
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SEAMUS HEANEY I have always thought of poems as stepping stones in one's own sense of oneself. Every now and a...
SEAMUS HEANEY Eternal life can mean utter reverence for life itself.
SEAMUS HEANEY The amount of sensory material stored up or stored down in the brain's and the body's system...
SEAMUS HEANEY But that citizen's perception was also at one with the truth in recognizing that the very brutal...
SEAMUS HEANEY I'm not personally obsessed with death. At a certain age, the light that you live in is inhabite...
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SEAMUS HEANEY No place in the world prides itself more on its vigilance and realism, no place considers itself mor...
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SEAMUS HEANEY In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium its...
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SEAMUS HEANEY I may have grown more attentive to the news and more alive to the world history and world-sorrow beh...
SEAMUS HEANEY The next move is always the test.
SEAMUS HEANEY It is difficult at times to repress the thought that history is about as instructive as an abattoir;...
SEAMUS HEANEY Getting started, keeping going, getting started again - in art and in life, it seems to me this is t...
SEAMUS HEANEY Yet there are times when a deeper need enters, when we want the poem to be not only pleasurably righ...
SEAMUS HEANEY I think of Dermot Healy as the heir to Patrick Kavanagh.
SEAMUS HEANEY I suppose you could say my father's world was Thomas Hardy and my mother's D.H. Lawrence.
SEAMUS HEANEY In my early teens, I acquired a kind of representative status: went on behalf of the family to wakes...
SEAMUS HEANEY Sink every impulse like a bolt. Secure
The bastion of sensation. Do not waver
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SEAMUS HEANEY But the thing uttered by the speaker I strain towards is still not quite the story of what is going ...
SEAMUS HEANEY Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.
SEAMUS HEANEY The kinds of truth that art gives us many, many times are small truths. They don't have the reso...
SEAMUS HEANEY I have begun to think of life as a series of ripples widening out from an original center.
SEAMUS HEANEY The kind of poet who founds and reconstitutes values is somebody like Yeats or Whitman - these are p...
SEAMUS HEANEY Yeats was 18th-century oratory, almost.
SEAMUS HEANEY I've always associated the moment of writing with a moment of lift, of joy, of unexpected reward...
SEAMUS HEANEY In poetry, everything can be faked but the intensity of utterance.
SEAMUS HEANEY All I know is a door into the dark
SEAMUS HEANEY Behaviour that's admired
is the path to power among people everywhere.
SEAMUS HEANEY The experiment of poetry, as far as I am concerned, happens when the poem carries you beyond where y...
SEAMUS HEANEY To encounter 'Beowulf' is like taking a sledgehammer to a quarry face. You must bang in ther...
SEAMUS HEANEY You yourself don't have to be shaken by mortal danger in order to feel your mortality.
SEAMUS HEANEY Sonnet is about movement in a form.
SEAMUS HEANEY I always had a superstitious fear of setting up a too well-designed writing place and then finding t...
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SEAMUS HEANEY Poems that come swiftly are usually the ones that you keep.
SEAMUS HEANEY Poetry is more a threshold than a path.
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SEAMUS HEANEY I would say that something important for me and for my generation in Northern Ireland was the 1947 E...
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SEAMUS MCATEER If you can't imagine female torch singers and Skrillex-style demon techno onstage at the same mo...
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