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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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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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At home in Ireland, there's a habit of avoidance, an ironical attitude towards the authority figure.
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Write whatever you like!
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Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.
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I suppose I'm saying that defiance is actually part of the lyric job
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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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Between my finger and my thumb The squat pen rests snug as a gun. ~from the poem Digging
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I rhyme… to see myself, to set the darkness echoing.
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The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.
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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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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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The dotted line my father's ashplant made On Sandymount Strand Is something else the tide won't wash away.
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I have always thought of poems as stepping stones in one's own sense of oneself.
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I suppose I did feel a certain public pressure always.
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Behaviour that's admired is the path to power among people everywhere.
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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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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.
Seamus Heaney
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Harvard created wonderful conditions for me as a writerbut the writing was done, almost entirely, when I got home.
Seamus Heaney
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Walk on air against your better judgement.
Seamus Heaney
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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.
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