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The fact of the matter is that the most unexpected and miraculous thing in my life was the arrival in it of poetry itself - as a vocation and an elevation almost.

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
Unexpected
Poetry
Almost
Fact
Arrival
Facts
Elevation
Matter
Arrivals
Thing
Vocation
Life
Miraculous

More quotes by Seamus Heaney

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Poetry is language in orbit.
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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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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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Loyalism, or Unionism, or Protestantism, or whatever you want to call it, in Northern Ireland - it operates not as a class system, but a caste system.
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The way we are living, timorous or bold, will have been our life.
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Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.
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The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.
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There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you.
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I rhyme… to see myself, to set the darkness echoing.
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Two buckets were easier carried than one. / I grew up in between.
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I always believed that whatever had to be written would somehow get itself written.
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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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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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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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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
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Once I was on the job, once I had got started, I felt safe enough, but the anticipation made me tense.
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The dotted line my father's ashplant made On Sandymount Strand Is something else the tide won't wash away.
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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.
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Even if the last move did not succeed, the inner command says move again.
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I suppose I'm saying that defiance is actually part of the lyric job
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