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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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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
Hidden
Factors
Complicating
Generally
Northern
Speech
Scotland
Anyone
Terrific
Point
Factor
Speak
Ireland
Speaks

More quotes by Seamus Heaney

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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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I have always thought of poems as stepping stones in one's own sense of oneself. Every now and again, you write a poem that gives you self-respect and steadies your going a little bit farther out in the stream. At the same time, you have to conjure the next stepping stone because the stream, we hope, keeps flowing.
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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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In off the moors, down through the mist beams, god-cursed Grendel came greedily loping.
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Believe that a further shore is reachable from here.
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Even if the last move did not succeed, the inner command says move again.
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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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Harvard created wonderful conditions for me as a writerbut the writing was done, almost entirely, when I got home.
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But even so, none of the news of these world-spasms entered me as terror.
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I've nothing against the Queen personally: I had lunch at the Palace once upon a time.
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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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The way we are living, timorous or bold, will have been our life.
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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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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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Write whatever you like!
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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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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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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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I always believed that whatever had to be written would somehow get itself written.
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Wherever that man went, he went gratefully.
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