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Suspect too much sweet talk but never close your mind.

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
Suspects
Close
Sweet
Talk
Much
Mind
Never
Nymphs
Suspect

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But even so, none of the news of these world-spasms entered me as terror.
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I always believed that whatever had to be written would somehow get itself written.
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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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At home in Ireland, there's a habit of avoidance, an ironical attitude towards the authority figure.
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The whole relationship between a writer's spiritual/emotional condition and the kind of wordstuff and form-making that's going on in his work is an interesting one. When I was an undergraduate, there was a glib notion around that there was no reason to suppose a bad man could be a good writer.
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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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Two buckets were easier carried than one. / I grew up in between.
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If you have the words, there's always a chance that you'll find the way.
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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 suppose I'm saying that defiance is actually part of the lyric job
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Even if the last move did not succeed, the inner command says move again.
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The next move is always the test.
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Poetry is language in orbit.
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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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The way we are living, timorous or bold, will have been our life.
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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.
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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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Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.
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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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Believe that a further shore is reachable from here.
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