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

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The next move is always the test.
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On the contrary, a trust in the staying power and travel-worthiness of such good should encourage us to credit the possibility of a world where respect for the validity of every tradition will issue in the creation and maintenance of a salubrious political space.
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In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself.
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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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My body was braille for the creeping influences.
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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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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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The end of art is peace.
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The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.
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The way we are living, timorous or bold, will have been our life.
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I always believed that whatever had to be written would somehow get itself written.
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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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Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.
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I have begun to think of life as a series of ripples widening out from an original center.
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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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Now it’s high watermark and floodtide in the heart and time to go. The sea-nymphs in the spray will be the chorus now. What’s left to say? Suspect too much sweet-talk but never close your mind. It was a fortunate wind that blew me here. I leave half-ready to believe that a crippled trust might walk and the half-true rhyme is love.
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