Quote

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.

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
Issues
Contrary
Space
Credit
Political
Tradition
Worthiness
Power
Travel
Validity
Every
Possibility
Maintenance
Good
Creation
Encourage
World
Trust
Staying
Respect
Issue

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Behaviour that's admired is the path to power among people everywhere.
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Poetry is language in orbit.
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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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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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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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I always believed that whatever had to be written would somehow get itself written.
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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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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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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 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.
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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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The way we are living, timorous or bold, will have been our life.
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Suspect too much sweet talk but never close your mind.
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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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Nowadays, what an award gives is a sense of solidarity with the poetry guild, as it were: sustenance coming from the assent of your peers on the judging panel.
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Believe that a further shore is reachable from here.
Seamus Heaney
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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.
Seamus Heaney
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The next move is always the test.
Seamus Heaney
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My body was braille for the creeping influences.
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