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The way we are living, timorous or bold, will have been our life.

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
Living
Way
Life
Timorous
Bold

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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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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 have always thought of poems as stepping stones in one's own sense of oneself.
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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 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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I always believed that whatever had to be written would somehow get itself written.
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I drink to keep body and soul apart.
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Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.
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I suppose I did feel a certain public pressure always.
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If you have the words, there's always a chance that you'll find the way.
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At home in Ireland, there's a habit of avoidance, an ironical attitude towards the authority figure.
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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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But even so, none of the news of these world-spasms entered me as terror.
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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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My body was braille for the creeping influences.
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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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Poetry cannot afford to lose its fundamentally self-delighting inventiveness, its joy in being a process of language as well as a representation of things in the world.
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Walk on air against your better judgement.
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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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