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I shall gain glory or die.

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
Gain
Gains
Glory
Shall
Dies

More quotes by Seamus Heaney

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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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Suspect too much sweet talk but never close your mind.
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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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Between my finger and my thumb The squat pen rests snug as a gun. ~from the poem Digging
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I drink to keep body and soul apart.
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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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My body was braille for the creeping influences.
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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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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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But even so, none of the news of these world-spasms entered me as terror.
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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.
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Once off the bush The fruit fermented, the sweet flesh would turn sour. I always felt like crying. It wasn't fair That all the lovely canfuls smelt of rot. Each year I hoped they'd keep, knew they would not. -Blackberry picking
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If you have the words, there's always a chance that you'll find the way.
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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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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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Walk on air against your better judgement.
Seamus Heaney
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Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.
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I rhyme… to see myself, to set the darkness echoing.
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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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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.
Seamus Heaney