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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
Bold
Living
Way
Life
Timorous

More quotes by Seamus Heaney

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I always believed that whatever had to be written would somehow get itself written.
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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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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 Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.
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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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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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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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There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you.
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Suspect too much sweet talk but never close your mind.
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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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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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I have begun to think of life as a series of ripples widening out from an original center.
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Wherever that man went, he went gratefully.
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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 fact of the matter is that the most unexpected and miraculous thing in my life was the arrival in it of poetry itself - as a vocation and an elevation almost.
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Two buckets were easier carried than one. / I grew up in between.
Seamus Heaney
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My body was braille for the creeping influences.
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Write whatever you like!
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I suppose I'm saying that defiance is actually part of the lyric job
Seamus Heaney