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Seamus Heaney Biography

Seamus Justin Heaney MRIA (/ˈʃeɪməs ˈhiːni/; 13 April 1939 – 30 August 2013) was an Irish poet, playwright and translator. He received the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature.

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Seamus Heaney Quotes

Believe that a further shore is reachable from here.

Believe, Further, I Forgive You, Reachable, Shore

Memory has always been fundamental for me. In fact, remembering what I had forgotten is the way most of the poems get started.

Forgotten, Fundamental, Fundamentals, Memories, Poems, Way

There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you.

Risk, Truth, World

Irish readers, British readers, American readers: is it odd that I haven't a clue about how differently they react? Or better say, I cannot find the words to describe my hunch about them.

Clue, Hunches, Irish, Odd, Words

Once I was on the job, once I had got started, I felt safe enough, but the anticipation made me tense.

Anticipation, Enough, Jobs, Safe

Hope for a great sea-change timid to rebuke and too petty to forgive.

Forgive, Forgiveness, Forgiving, Hope, Petty, Sea

Anything Can Happen is also, incidentally, a poem that arose from teaching. I'd talked about the Horace Ode (I, 34) [on which the poem is based] in a lecture I gave at Harvard in the fall of 2000 entitled Bright Boltsand remembered it after the Twin Towers attack.

Boltsand, Fall, Incidentally, Teaching, Towers

I have begun to think of life as a series of ripples widening out from an original center.

Begun, Life, Originals, Ripple, Ripples, Thinking

Once off the bush The fruit fermented, the sweet flesh would turn sour. I always felt like crying. It wasn't fair That all the lovely canfuls smelt of rot. Each year I hoped they'd keep, knew they would not. -Blackberry picking

Fermented, Fruit, Hoped, Lovely, Sweet, Years

The whole relationship between a writer's spiritual
emotional condition and the kind of wordstuff and form-making that's going on in his work is an interesting one. When I was an undergraduate, there was a glib notion around that there was no reason to suppose a bad man could be a good writer.

Emotional, Glib, Good, Interesting, Men, Spiritual

The thing about writing is that if you have the impulse, you will find the time.

Ifs, Impulse, Thing, Writing

There is not built-in meaning to anything, we are free to add any meaning we choose to give it.

Add, Built, Choose, Free, Give, Giving

On the contrary, a trust in the staying power and travel-worthiness of such good should encourage us to credit the possibility of a world where respect for the validity of every tradition will issue in the creation and maintenance of a salubrious political space.

Issues, Maintenance, Political, Salubrious, Space, World

Harvard created wonderful conditions for me as a writerbut the writing was done, almost entirely, when I got home.

Done, Entirely, Home, Wonderful, Writing

Wherever that man went, he went gratefully.

Gratefully, Man, Men, Wherever

The most exhilarating for the writer and the reader, are gift-things-poems which arrive on their own energy, poems that in William Shakespeare's term "slip" from you.

Energy, Reader, Term, William, Writer

Between my finger and my thumb The squat pen rests; snug as a gun. ~from the poem "Digging

Digging, Finger, Gun, Squat, Thumbs

Allow ourselves to do as Ram Dass said in his delicious phrase "Be Here Now. " If you are here now you cannot fall into falsely constructed gender projections.

Dass, Fall, Falsely, Phrases, Projections, Rams

But that citizen's perception was also at one with the truth in recognizing that the very brutality of the means by which the IRA were pursuing change was destructive of the trust upon which new possibilities would have to be based.

Brutality, Ira, Mean, Perception, Trust

Desmond O'Grady is one of the senior figures in Irish Literary life, exemplary in the way he has committed himself over the decades to the vocation of poetry and has lived selflessly for the art

Art, Lived, Poetry, Senior, Way

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Seamus Heaney Biography

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