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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.

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
Citizens
Sinners
Reader
Realism
Positive
Note
Sense
Sinner
Reality
Aesthetic
Make
Readers
Notes
Writers
Wary

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My point is there's a hidden Scotland in anyone who speaks the Northern Ireland speech. It's a terrific complicating factor, not just in Northern Ireland, but Ireland generally.
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Even if the last move did not succeed, the inner command says move again.
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Poetry is language in orbit.
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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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Nowadays, what an award gives is a sense of solidarity with the poetry guild, as it were: sustenance coming from the assent of your peers on the judging panel.
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The way we are living, timorous or bold, will have been our life.
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I shall gain glory or die.
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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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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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I have always thought of poems as stepping stones in one's own sense of oneself. Every now and again, you write a poem that gives you self-respect and steadies your going a little bit farther out in the stream. At the same time, you have to conjure the next stepping stone because the stream, we hope, keeps flowing.
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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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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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Walk on air against your better judgement.
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Yet there are times when a deeper need enters, when we want the poem to be not only pleasurably right but compellingly wise, not only a surprising variation played upon the world, but a re-tuning of the world itself.
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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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If you have the words, there's always a chance that you'll find the way.
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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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The gift of writing is to be self-forgetful... to get a surge of inner life or inner supply or unexpected sense of empowerment, to be afloat, to be out of yourself.
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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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