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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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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
Would
Ears
Sofas
Became
Speaker
Listening
Speakers
Arms
Deliberate
Went
Climb
Bigs
Climbs
Hands
Concentration
Wireless
Years
Closer
Sofa

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The end of art is peace.
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Behaviour that's admired is the path to power among people everywhere.
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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 hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.
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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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I can't think of a case where poems changed the world, but what they do is they change people's understanding of what's going on in the world.
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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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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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But even so, none of the news of these world-spasms entered me as terror.
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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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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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I suppose I did feel a certain public pressure always.
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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 might enjoy being an albatross, being able to glide for days and daydream for hundreds of miles along the thermals. And then being able to hang like an affliction round some people's necks.
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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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