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

More quotes by Seamus Heaney

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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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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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The aim of poetry and the poet is finally to be of service, to ply the effort of the individual into the larger work of the community as a whole.
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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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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.
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The next move is always the test.
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Allow ourselves to do as Ram Dass said in his delicious phrase Be Here Now. If you are here now you cannot fall into falsely constructed gender projections.
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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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If you have the words, there's always a chance that you'll find the way.
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I have always thought of poems as stepping stones in one's own sense of oneself.
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Suspect too much sweet talk but never close your mind.
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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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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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A public expectation, it has to be said, not of poetry as such but of political positions variously approvable by mutually disapproving groups.
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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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If self is a location, so is love: Bearings taken, markings, cardinal points, Options, obstinacies, dug heels, and distance, Here and there and now and then, a stance.
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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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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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I shall gain glory or die.
Seamus Heaney
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Even if the last move did not succeed, the inner command says move again.
Seamus Heaney