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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.
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
Operates
Northern
Ireland
System
Class
Unionism
Call
Protestantism
Whatever
Caste
Castes
More quotes by Seamus Heaney
I always believed that whatever had to be written would somehow get itself written.
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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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Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.
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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 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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Yet there are times when a deeper need enters, when we want the poem to be not only pleasurably right but compellingly wise, not only a surprising variation played upon the world, but a re-tuning of the world itself.
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But even so, none of the news of these world-spasms entered me as terror.
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Harvard created wonderful conditions for me as a writerbut the writing was done, almost entirely, when I got home.
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The way we are living, timorous or bold, will have been our life.
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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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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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I suppose I did feel a certain public pressure always.
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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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The completely solitary self: that's where poetry comes from, and it gets isolated by crisis, and those crises are often very intimate also.
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I suppose I'm saying that defiance is actually part of the lyric job
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Even if the last move did not succeed, the inner command says move again.
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When I first encountered the name of the city of Stockholm, I little thought that I would ever visit it, never mind end up being welcomed to it as a guest of the Swedish Academy and the Nobel Foundation.
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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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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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I've nothing against the Queen personally: I had lunch at the Palace once upon a time.
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