Quote

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

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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
Mean
Possibility
Pursuing
Would
Citizens
Brutality
Trust
Recognizing
Upon
Citizen
Means
Possibilities
Truth
Destructive
Also
Perception
Change
Based
Ira

More quotes by Seamus Heaney

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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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I shall gain glory or die.
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My body was braille for the creeping influences.
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It has as much to do with the energy released by linguistic fission and fusion, with the buoyancy generated by cadence and tone and rhyme and stanza, as it has to do with the poem's concerns or the poet's truthfulness.
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The whole relationship between a writer's spiritual/emotional condition and the kind of wordstuff and form-making that's going on in his work is an interesting one. When I was an undergraduate, there was a glib notion around that there was no reason to suppose a bad man could be a good writer.
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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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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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Behaviour that's admired is the path to power among people everywhere.
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I drink to keep body and soul apart.
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Anything Can Happen is also, incidentally, a poem that arose from teaching. I'd talked about the Horace Ode (I, 34) [on which the poem is based] in a lecture I gave at Harvard in the fall of 2000 entitled Bright Boltsand remembered it after the Twin Towers attack.
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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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The next move is always the test.
Seamus Heaney
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There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you.
Seamus Heaney
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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.
Seamus Heaney
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The fact of the matter is that the most unexpected and miraculous thing in my life was the arrival in it of poetry itself - as a vocation and an elevation almost.
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I've always associated the moment of writing with a moment of lift, of joy, of unexpected reward.
Seamus Heaney
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Best to say that once a poem is finished I trust it to make its way, and I trust readers will find their way to it and through it, if the thing has got itself rightly expressed.
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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 rhyme… to see myself, to set the darkness echoing.
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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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