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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
Lunch
Personally
Upon
Nothing
Time
Palace
Palaces
Queen
Queens

More quotes by Seamus Heaney

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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
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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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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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Strange, it is a huge nothing that we fear.
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Poetry is language in orbit.
Seamus Heaney
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Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.
Seamus Heaney
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I rhyme… to see myself, to set the darkness echoing.
Seamus Heaney
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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.
Seamus Heaney
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I have always thought of poems as stepping stones in one's own sense of oneself.
Seamus Heaney
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The end of art is peace.
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The way we are living, timorous or bold, will have been our life.
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A public expectation, it has to be said, not of poetry as such but of political positions variously approvable by mutually disapproving groups.
Seamus Heaney
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I suppose I'm saying that defiance is actually part of the lyric job
Seamus Heaney
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Yet there are times when a deeper need enters, when we want the poem to be not only pleasurably right but compellingly wise, not only a surprising variation played upon the world, but a re-tuning of the world itself.
Seamus Heaney
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Believe that a further shore is reachable from here.
Seamus Heaney
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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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Memory has always been fundamental for me. In fact, remembering what I had forgotten is the way most of the poems get started.
Seamus Heaney
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I always believed that whatever had to be written would somehow get itself written.
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.
Seamus Heaney
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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.
Seamus Heaney