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1. black
2. grey
3. blue
4. red
5. brown
6. white

The poet is on the side of undeceiving the world.

Seamus Heaney

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More Seamus Heaney Quotes

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  My language and my sensibility are yearning to admit a kind of religious or transcendent dimension. But then there’s the reality: there’s no Heaven, no afterlife of the sort we were promised, and no personal God.

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  I came from a farming background, and my career was teaching.

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  I always believed that whatever had to be written would somehow get itself written.

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  I’ve said it before about the Nobel Prize: it’s like being struck by a more or less benign avalanche. It was unexpected, unlooked for, and extraordinary.

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  Every time you read a poem aloud to yourself in the presence of others, you are reading it into yourself and them. Voice helps to carry words farther and deeper than the eye.

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  I have begun to think of life as a series of ripples widening out from an original center.

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  The kinds of truth that art gives us many, many times are small truths. They don’t have the resonance of an encyclical from the Pope stating an eternal truth, but they partake of the quality of eternity. There is a sort of timeless delight in them.

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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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• 

  I suppose you inevitably fall into habits of expression.

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  My experience is that prose usually equals duty – last minute, overdue-deadline stuff or a panic lecture to be written.

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• 

  I’m a firm believer in learning by heart.

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  Tom Sleigh’s poetry is hard-earned and well founded. I great admire the way it refuses to cut emotional corners and yet achieves a sense of lyric absolution.

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  The experiment of poetry, as far as I am concerned, happens when the poem carries you beyond where you could have reasonably expected to go.

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  Anyone born and bred in Northern Ireland can’t be too optimistic.

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  Poetry is what we do to break bread with the dead.

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  Your temperament is what you write with, but it’s also how you deal with the world.

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