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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
Northern
Ireland
System
Class
Unionism
Call
Protestantism
Whatever
Caste
Castes
Operates

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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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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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I have begun to think of life as a series of ripples widening out from an original center.
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But even so, none of the news of these world-spasms entered me as terror.
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The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.
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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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Between my finger and my thumb The squat pen rests snug as a gun. ~from the poem Digging
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