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

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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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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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Behaviour that's admired is the path to power among people everywhere.
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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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Write whatever you like!
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Suspect too much sweet talk but never close your mind.
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Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.
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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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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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Anything Can Happen is also, incidentally, a poem that arose from teaching. I'd talked about the Horace Ode (I, 34) [on which the poem is based] in a lecture I gave at Harvard in the fall of 2000 entitled Bright Boltsand remembered it after the Twin Towers attack.
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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 Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.
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The dotted line my father's ashplant made On Sandymount Strand Is something else the tide won't wash away.
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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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Walk on air against your better judgement.
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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 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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