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I've nothing against the Queen personally: I had lunch at the Palace once upon a time.

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
Palaces
Queen
Queens
Lunch
Personally
Upon
Nothing
Time
Palace

More quotes by Seamus Heaney

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As writers and readers, as sinners and citizens, our realism and our aesthetic sense make us wary of crediting the positive note.
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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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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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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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Sink every impulse like a bolt. Secure The bastion of sensation. Do not waver Into language. Do not waver in it.
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I always believed that whatever had to be written would somehow get itself written.
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Two buckets were easier carried than one. / I grew up in between.
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Loyalism, or Unionism, or Protestantism, or whatever you want to call it, in Northern Ireland - it operates not as a class system, but a caste system.
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If you have the words, there's always a chance that you'll find the way.
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I shall gain glory or die.
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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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The dotted line my father's ashplant made On Sandymount Strand Is something else the tide won't wash away.
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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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Between my finger and my thumb The squat pen rests snug as a gun. ~from the poem Digging
Seamus Heaney
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The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.
Seamus Heaney
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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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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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It has as much to do with the energy released by linguistic fission and fusion, with the buoyancy generated by cadence and tone and rhyme and stanza, as it has to do with the poem's concerns or the poet's truthfulness.
Seamus Heaney
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Write whatever you like!
Seamus Heaney