Quote

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.

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
Mind
High
Close
Blew
Believe
Talk
Sweet
Spray
Half
Walk
Chorus
Never
Left
Wind
Rhyme
Time
True
Trust
Suspect
Love
Might
Leave
Suspects
Heart
Walks
Fortunate
Nymphs
Much
Ready
Sea
Crippled

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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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Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.
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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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The way we are living, timorous or bold, will have been our life.
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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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I have always thought of poems as stepping stones in one's own sense of oneself.
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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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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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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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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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Allow ourselves to do as Ram Dass said in his delicious phrase Be Here Now. If you are here now you cannot fall into falsely constructed gender projections.
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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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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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Two buckets were easier carried than one. / I grew up in between.
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I drink to keep body and soul apart.
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But even so, none of the news of these world-spasms entered me as terror.
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If you have the words, there's always a chance that you'll find the way.
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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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Between my finger and my thumb The squat pen rests snug as a gun. ~from the poem Digging
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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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