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

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I shall gain glory or die.
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The way we are living, timorous or bold, will have been our life.
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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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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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I've nothing against the Queen personally: I had lunch at the Palace once upon a time.
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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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Suspect too much sweet talk but never close your mind.
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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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In off the moors, down through the mist beams, god-cursed Grendel came greedily loping.
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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.
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I rhyme… to see myself, to set the darkness echoing.
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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 whole relationship between a writer's spiritual/emotional condition and the kind of wordstuff and form-making that's going on in his work is an interesting one. When I was an undergraduate, there was a glib notion around that there was no reason to suppose a bad man could be a good writer.
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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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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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Even if the last move did not succeed, the inner command says move again.
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Now it’s high watermark and floodtide in the heart and time to go. The sea-nymphs in the spray will be the chorus now. What’s left to say? Suspect too much sweet-talk but never close your mind. It was a fortunate wind that blew me here. I leave half-ready to believe that a crippled trust might walk and the half-true rhyme is love.
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Poetry is language in orbit.
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But even so, none of the news of these world-spasms entered me as terror.
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