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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've nothing against the Queen personally: I had lunch at the Palace once upon a time.
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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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I shall gain glory or die.
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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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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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Write whatever you like!
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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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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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The end of art is peace.
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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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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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Harvard created wonderful conditions for me as a writerbut the writing was done, almost entirely, when I got home.
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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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If you have the words, there's always a chance that you'll find the way.
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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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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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But even so, none of the news of these world-spasms entered me as terror.
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I've always associated the moment of writing with a moment of lift, of joy, of unexpected reward.
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Even if the last move did not succeed, the inner command says move again.
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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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