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At home in Ireland, there's a habit of avoidance, an ironical attitude towards the authority figure.

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
Authority
Habit
Attitude
Ironical
Avoidance
Home
Ireland
Towards
Figure
Figures

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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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I suppose I did feel a certain public pressure always.
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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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I've always associated the moment of writing with a moment of lift, of joy, of unexpected reward.
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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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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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My body was braille for the creeping influences.
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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.
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I've nothing against the Queen personally: I had lunch at the Palace once upon a time.
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I rhyme… to see myself, to set the darkness echoing.
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Poetry is language in orbit.
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The end of art is peace.
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There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you.
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In off the moors, down through the mist beams, god-cursed Grendel came greedily loping.
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Memory has always been fundamental for me. In fact, remembering what I had forgotten is the way most of the poems get started.
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I shall gain glory or die.
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So hope for a great sea-change on the far side of revenge. Believe that further shore is reachable from here. Believe in miracles and cures and healing wells.
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But even so, none of the news of these world-spasms entered me as terror.
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Then as the years went on and my listening became more deliberate, I would climb up on an arm of our big sofa to get my ear closer to the wireless speaker.
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The way we are living, timorous or bold, will have been our life.
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