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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
Believed
Somehow
Written
Whatever
Always
Would

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There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you.
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My body was braille for the creeping influences.
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The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.
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In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself.
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Write whatever you like!
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The next move is always the test.
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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.
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Behaviour that's admired is the path to power among people everywhere.
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Now it’s high watermark and floodtide in the heart and time to go. The sea-nymphs in the spray will be the chorus now. What’s left to say? Suspect too much sweet-talk but never close your mind. It was a fortunate wind that blew me here. I leave half-ready to believe that a crippled trust might walk and the half-true rhyme is love.
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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.
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You had to come back to learn how to lose yourself, to be pilot and stray-witch, Hansel and Gretel in one.
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Sink every impulse like a bolt. Secure The bastion of sensation. Do not waver Into language. Do not waver in it.
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At home in Ireland, there's a habit of avoidance, an ironical attitude towards the authority figure.
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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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I suppose I'm saying that defiance is actually part of the lyric job
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The way we are living, timorous or bold, will have been our life.
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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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Believe that a further shore is reachable from here.
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I shall gain glory or die.
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I suppose I did feel a certain public pressure always.
Seamus Heaney