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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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  Memory has always been fundamental for me. In fact, remembering what I had forgotten is the way most of the poems get started.

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• 

  There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you.

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• 

  In the United States, in poetry workshops, it’s now quite a thing to make graduate students learn poems by heart.

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• 

  The group of writers I had grown up with in the ’60s – Derek Mahon, Michael Longley, James Simmons, John Hewitt, Paul Muldoon – formed a very necessary and self-sustaining group.

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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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• 

  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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• 

  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 amount of sensory material stored up or stored down in the brain’s and the body’s systems is inestimable. It’s like a culture at the bottom of a jar, although it doesn’t grow, I think, or help anything else to grow unless you find a way to reach it and touch it.

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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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• 

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

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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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• 

  A person from Northern Ireland is naturally cautious.

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• 

  The kind of poet who founds and reconstitutes values is somebody like Yeats or Whitman – these are public value-founders.

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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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• 

  The completely solitary self: that’s where poetry comes from, and it gets isolated by crisis, and those crises are often very intimate also.

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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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