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Strange, it is a huge nothing that we fear.

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
Fear
Nothing
Strange
Huge

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The next move is always the test.
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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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Even if the last move did not succeed, the inner command says move again.
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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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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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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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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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I rhyme… to see myself, to set the darkness echoing.
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My body was braille for the creeping influences.
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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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I drink to keep body and soul apart.
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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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But even so, none of the news of these world-spasms entered me as terror.
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The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.
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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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Wherever that man went, he went gratefully.
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Walk on air against your better judgement.
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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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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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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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