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The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.

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
Contemporaries
Inhabit
Irish
Ireland
Helped
Imagine

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I drink to keep body and soul apart.
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Write whatever you like!
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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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Harvard created wonderful conditions for me as a writerbut the writing was done, almost entirely, when I got home.
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Strange, it is a huge nothing that we fear.
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The next move is always the test.
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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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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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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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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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Wherever that man went, he went gratefully.
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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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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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At home in Ireland, there's a habit of avoidance, an ironical attitude towards the authority figure.
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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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Believe that a further shore is reachable from here.
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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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If you have the words, there's always a chance that you'll find the way.
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I have always thought of poems as stepping stones in one's own sense of oneself.
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Even if the last move did not succeed, the inner command says move again.
Seamus Heaney