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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
System
Class
Unionism
Call
Protestantism
Whatever
Caste
Castes
Operates
Northern
Ireland

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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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I suppose I'm saying that defiance is actually part of the lyric job
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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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Between my finger and my thumb The squat pen rests snug as a gun. ~from the poem Digging
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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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I shall gain glory or die.
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My point is there's a hidden Scotland in anyone who speaks the Northern Ireland speech. It's a terrific complicating factor, not just in Northern Ireland, but Ireland generally.
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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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There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you.
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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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Behaviour that's admired is the path to power among people everywhere.
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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 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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In off the moors, down through the mist beams, god-cursed Grendel came greedily loping.
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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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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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But even so, none of the news of these world-spasms entered me as terror.
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