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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.

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
Gift
Sense
Afloat
Self
Surge
Writing
Forgetful
Life
Empowerment
Supply
Unexpected
Inner

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Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.
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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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A public expectation, it has to be said, not of poetry as such but of political positions variously approvable by mutually disapproving groups.
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I suppose I did feel a certain public pressure always.
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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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I have begun to think of life as a series of ripples widening out from an original center.
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If you have the words, there's always a chance that you'll find the way.
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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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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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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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In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself.
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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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I suppose I'm saying that defiance is actually part of the lyric job
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Behaviour that's admired is the path to power among people everywhere.
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Believe that a further shore is reachable from here.
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My body was braille for the creeping influences.
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