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I suppose I did feel a certain public pressure always.

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
Feel
Feels
Always
Suppose
Pressure
Public
Certain

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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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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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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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Suspect too much sweet talk but never close your mind.
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Even if the last move did not succeed, the inner command says move again.
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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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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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Between my finger and my thumb The squat pen rests snug as a gun. ~from the poem Digging
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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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Wherever that man went, he went gratefully.
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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 shall gain glory or die.
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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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The dotted line my father's ashplant made On Sandymount Strand Is something else the tide won't wash away.
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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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The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.
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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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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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Believe that a further shore is reachable from here.
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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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