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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
Stepping
Poems
Stones
Oneself
Sense
Thought
Always

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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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Memory has always been fundamental for me. In fact, remembering what I had forgotten is the way most of the poems get started.
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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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So hope for a great sea-change on the far side of revenge. Believe that further shore is reachable from here. Believe in miracles and cures and healing wells.
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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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In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself.
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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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My body was braille for the creeping influences.
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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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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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I have always thought of poems as stepping stones in one's own sense of oneself. Every now and again, you write a poem that gives you self-respect and steadies your going a little bit farther out in the stream. At the same time, you have to conjure the next stepping stone because the stream, we hope, keeps flowing.
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Behaviour that's admired is the path to power among people everywhere.
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Wherever that man went, he went gratefully.
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Once off the bush The fruit fermented, the sweet flesh would turn sour. I always felt like crying. It wasn't fair That all the lovely canfuls smelt of rot. Each year I hoped they'd keep, knew they would not. -Blackberry picking
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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 drink to keep body and soul apart.
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The way we are living, timorous or bold, will have been our life.
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I shall gain glory or die.
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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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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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