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So hope for a great sea-change on the far side of revenge. Believe that further shore is reachable from here. Believe in miracles and cures and healing wells.

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
Hope
Cures
Change
Revenge
Wells
Forgiveness
Great
Healing
Believe
Miracle
Sea
Reachable
Side
Miracles
Sides
Shore

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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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I drink to keep body and soul apart.
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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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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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The next move is always the test.
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I suppose I did feel a certain public pressure always.
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Poetry is language in orbit.
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The end of art is peace.
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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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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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I rhyme… to see myself, to set the darkness echoing.
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Wherever that man went, he went gratefully.
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Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.
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Yet there are times when a deeper need enters, when we want the poem to be not only pleasurably right but compellingly wise, not only a surprising variation played upon the world, but a re-tuning of the world itself.
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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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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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The aim of poetry and the poet is finally to be of service, to ply the effort of the individual into the larger work of the community as a whole.
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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 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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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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