Quote

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

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The aim of poetry and the poet is finally to be of service, to ply the effort of the individual into the larger work of the community as a whole.
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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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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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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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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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Write whatever you like!
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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've always associated the moment of writing with a moment of lift, of joy, of unexpected reward.
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My body was braille for the creeping influences.
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The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.
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Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.
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Even if the last move did not succeed, the inner command says move again.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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The dotted line my father's ashplant made On Sandymount Strand Is something else the tide won't wash away.
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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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