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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
Strange
Huge
Fear
Nothing

More quotes by Seamus Heaney

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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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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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You had to come back to learn how to lose yourself, to be pilot and stray-witch, Hansel and Gretel in one.
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Best to say that once a poem is finished I trust it to make its way, and I trust readers will find their way to it and through it, if the thing has got itself rightly expressed.
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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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Suspect too much sweet talk but never close your mind.
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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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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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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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Behaviour that's admired is the path to power among people everywhere.
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Walk on air against your better judgement.
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Nowadays, what an award gives is a sense of solidarity with the poetry guild, as it were: sustenance coming from the assent of your peers on the judging panel.
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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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But even so, none of the news of these world-spasms entered me as terror.
Seamus Heaney
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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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I drink to keep body and soul apart.
Seamus Heaney
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I rhyme… to see myself, to set the darkness echoing.
Seamus Heaney
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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.
Seamus Heaney
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I shall gain glory or die.
Seamus Heaney
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The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.
Seamus Heaney