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

More quotes by Seamus Heaney

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I drink to keep body and soul apart.
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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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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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The next move is always the test.
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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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Two buckets were easier carried than one. / I grew up in between.
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Strange, it is a huge nothing that we fear.
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Walk on air against your better judgement.
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I always believed that whatever had to be written would somehow get itself written.
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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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At home in Ireland, there's a habit of avoidance, an ironical attitude towards the authority figure.
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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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My body was braille for the creeping influences.
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You had to come back to learn how to lose yourself, to be pilot and stray-witch, Hansel and Gretel in one.
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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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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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I rhyme… to see myself, to set the darkness echoing.
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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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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.
Seamus Heaney
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Poetry is language in orbit.
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