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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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  I’ve always associated the moment of writing with a moment of lift, of joy, of unexpected reward.

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• 

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

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  Without needing to be theoretically instructed, consciousness quickly realizes that it is the site of variously contending discourses.

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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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  The murder of Sean Brown hurt my soul.

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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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• 

  It is very true to say that work done by writers is quite often an attempt to give solid expression to that which is bothering them. They feel they have got it right if they express the stress.

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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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  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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• 

  The problem as you get older, is that you become more self-aware. At the same time, you have to surprise yourself. There’s no way of arranging the surprise, so it is tricky.

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• 

  I’m not personally obsessed with death. At a certain age, the light that you live in is inhabited by the shades – it ’tis.

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• 

  Even if the last move did not succeed, the inner command says move again.

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  In Northern Ireland, helicopters are not usually used to promote poetry.

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  History says, ‘Don’t hope on this side of the grave.’

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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 think that water is immediately interesting. It’s just, as an element, it is full of life. It is associated with origin; it is bright – it reflects you.

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