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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.

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
Felt
Enough
Made
Tense
Anticipation
Safe
Started
Jobs

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I suppose I did feel a certain public pressure always.
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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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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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If you have the words, there's always a chance that you'll find the way.
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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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In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself.
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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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I always believed that whatever had to be written would somehow get itself written.
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But that citizen's perception was also at one with the truth in recognizing that the very brutality of the means by which the IRA were pursuing change was destructive of the trust upon which new possibilities would have to be based.
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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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As writers and readers, as sinners and citizens, our realism and our aesthetic sense make us wary of crediting the positive note.
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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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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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Two buckets were easier carried than one. / I grew up in between.
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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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Walk on air against your better judgement.
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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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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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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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Once off the bush The fruit fermented, the sweet flesh would turn sour. I always felt like crying. It wasn't fair That all the lovely canfuls smelt of rot. Each year I hoped they'd keep, knew they would not. -Blackberry picking
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