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

Eternal life can mean utter reverence for life itself.

Seamus Heaney

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More Seamus Heaney Quotes

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  The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.

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• 

  My father and mother had no sense of entitlement for their children.

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• 

  I think of Dermot Healy as the heir to Patrick Kavanagh.

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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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• 

  I think the first little jolt I got was reading Gerard Manley Hopkins – I liked other poems… but Hopkins was kind of electric for me – he changed the rules with speech, and the whole intensity of the language was there and so on.

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• 

  If poetry and the arts do anything, they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness.

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• 

  In a war situation or where violence and injustice are prevalent, poetry is called upon to be something more than a thing of beauty.

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• 

  I spend almost every morning with mail.

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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 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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• 

  I suppose you inevitably fall into habits of expression.

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• 

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

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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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• 

  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’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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• 

  I suppose you could say my father’s world was Thomas Hardy and my mother’s D.H. Lawrence.

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