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Walk on air against your better judgement.

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
Judgement
Air
Walk
Walks
Wisdom
Better

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Poetry is language in orbit.
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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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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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Behaviour that's admired is the path to power among people everywhere.
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I suppose I did feel a certain public pressure always.
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I suppose I'm saying that defiance is actually part of the lyric job
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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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Suspect too much sweet talk but never close your mind.
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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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At home in Ireland, there's a habit of avoidance, an ironical attitude towards the authority figure.
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Irish readers, British readers, American readers: is it odd that I haven't a clue about how differently they react? Or better say, I cannot find the words to describe my hunch about them.
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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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I might enjoy being an albatross, being able to glide for days and daydream for hundreds of miles along the thermals. And then being able to hang like an affliction round some people's necks.
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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.
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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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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 drink to keep body and soul apart.
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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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There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you.
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