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I have always thought of poems as stepping stones in one's own sense of oneself.

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
Thought
Always
Stepping
Poems
Stones
Oneself
Sense

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The end of art is peace.
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Walk on air against your better judgement.
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I suppose I'm saying that defiance is actually part of the lyric job
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I am not a playwright. A playwright would take Antigone and hit it a few clouts and knock it out of shape and restructure it. My versioning was strictly verbal.
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In off the moors, down through the mist beams, god-cursed Grendel came greedily loping.
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Poetry is language in orbit.
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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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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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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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Behaviour that's admired is the path to power among people everywhere.
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The next move is always the test.
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Believe that a further shore is reachable from here.
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I always believed that whatever had to be written would somehow get itself written.
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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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Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.
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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 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.
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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.
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