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

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Two buckets were easier carried than one. / I grew up in between.
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Even if the last move did not succeed, the inner command says move again.
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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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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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Write whatever you like!
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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 suppose I'm saying that defiance is actually part of the lyric job
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You had to come back to learn how to lose yourself, to be pilot and stray-witch, Hansel and Gretel in one.
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Believe that a further shore is reachable from here.
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Wherever that man went, he went gratefully.
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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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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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Strange, it is a huge nothing that we fear.
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My body was braille for the creeping influences.
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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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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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I've always associated the moment of writing with a moment of lift, of joy, of unexpected reward.
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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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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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