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I always believed that whatever had to be written would somehow get itself written.

Seamus Heaney

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Seamus Heaney
Age: 74 †
Born: 1939
Born: April 13
Died: 2013
Died: August 30
Actor
Author
Linguist
Playwright
Poet
Translator
University Teacher
Writer
Seamus Justin Heaney
Seamus Heaney
Written
Whatever
Always
Would
Believed
Somehow

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Wherever that man went, he went gratefully.
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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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As writers and readers, as sinners and citizens, our realism and our aesthetic sense make us wary of crediting the positive note.
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Behaviour that's admired is the path to power among people everywhere.
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If you have the words, there's always a chance that you'll find the way.
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I have always thought of poems as stepping stones in one's own sense of oneself.
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The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.
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I've always associated the moment of writing with a moment of lift, of joy, of unexpected reward.
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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.
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Believe that a further shore is reachable from here.
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If self is a location, so is love: Bearings taken, markings, cardinal points, Options, obstinacies, dug heels, and distance, Here and there and now and then, a stance.
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When I first encountered the name of the city of Stockholm, I little thought that I would ever visit it, never mind end up being welcomed to it as a guest of the Swedish Academy and the Nobel Foundation.
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Strange, it is a huge nothing that we fear.
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Harvard created wonderful conditions for me as a writerbut the writing was done, almost entirely, when I got home.
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My body was braille for the creeping influences.
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The gift of writing is to be self-forgetful... to get a surge of inner life or inner supply or unexpected sense of empowerment, to be afloat, to be out of yourself.
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Write whatever you like!
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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.
Seamus Heaney
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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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Two buckets were easier carried than one. / I grew up in between.
Seamus Heaney