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

Seamus Heaney

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

Believe Myself Writing
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.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Expectation Nobel Ordinary Prize
Eternal life can mean utter reverence for life itself.
SEAMUS HEANEY

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

Conscious Instruction Need Realize
I believe we are put here to improve civilisation.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Believe Civilization Improvement
In my early teens, I acquired a kind of representative status: went on behalf of the family to wakes and funerals and so on. And I would be counted on as an adult contributor when it came to farm work – the hay in the summertime, for example.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Family Farm Funeral Kind Representation Work
I think of the bog as a feminine goddess-ridden ground, rather like the territory of Ireland itself.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Goddess Myself Territory Thinking
It’s difficult to learn poems off by heart that don’t rhyme.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Difficult Heart Learning Rhyme
Sonnet is about movement in a form.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Form Movement One Liner
My father and mother had no sense of entitlement for their children.
SEAMUS HEANEY

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

Death Light Myself Obsession Personally
A person from Northern Ireland is naturally cautious.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Caution Natural Person
What I’ve said before, only half in joke, is that everybody in Ireland is famous. Or, maybe better, say everybody is familiar.
SEAMUS HEANEY

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

Beautiful Injustice Situation Violence
One doesn’t want one’s identity coerced.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Identity Oneself
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.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Brutal Change Citizenship Destruction Perception Possible Pursue Recognition

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

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

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