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There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you.

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
World
Risk
Truth

More quotes by Seamus Heaney

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I always believed that whatever had to be written would somehow get itself written.
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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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Wherever that man went, he went gratefully.
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Poetry is language in orbit.
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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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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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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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Even if the last move did not succeed, the inner command says move again.
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I am not a playwright. A playwright would take Antigone and hit it a few clouts and knock it out of shape and restructure it. My versioning was strictly verbal.
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My body was braille for the creeping influences.
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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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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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Strange, it is a huge nothing that we fear.
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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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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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I suppose I'm saying that defiance is actually part of the lyric job
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The next move is always the test.
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Believe that a further shore is reachable from here.
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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.
Seamus Heaney