Quote

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.

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
Along
Daydreaming
Days
Affliction
Enjoy
Necks
Able
Hundreds
Might
Hang
Like
Round
Albatross
People
Rounds
Daydream
Miles
Glide

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The next move is always the test.
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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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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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Suspect too much sweet talk but never close your mind.
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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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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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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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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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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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I've always associated the moment of writing with a moment of lift, of joy, of unexpected reward.
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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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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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If you have the words, there's always a chance that you'll find the way.
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I rhyme… to see myself, to set the darkness echoing.
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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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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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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 off the moors, down through the mist beams, god-cursed Grendel came greedily loping.
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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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