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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.

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
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University Teacher
Writer
Seamus Justin Heaney
Seamus Heaney
Always
Forgotten
Memory
Memories
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Remembering
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Poems
Remember
Fundamental
Way
Fundamentals

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Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.
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The way we are living, timorous or bold, will have been our life.
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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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I have always thought of poems as stepping stones in one's own sense of oneself.
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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 shall gain glory or die.
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Then as the years went on and my listening became more deliberate, I would climb up on an arm of our big sofa to get my ear closer to the wireless speaker.
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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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The next move is always the test.
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Once I was on the job, once I had got started, I felt safe enough, but the anticipation made me tense.
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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 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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Best to say that once a poem is finished I trust it to make its way, and I trust readers will find their way to it and through it, if the thing has got itself rightly expressed.
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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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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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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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Behaviour that's admired is the path to power among people everywhere.
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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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The dotted line my father's ashplant made On Sandymount Strand Is something else the tide won't wash away.
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