Seamus Deane > Quotes

“People with green eyes were close to the fairies, we were told; they were just here for a little while, looking for a human child they could take away. If we ever met anyone with one green and one brown eye we were to cross ourselves, for that was a human child that had been taken over by the fairies. The brown eye was the sign it had been human. When it died, it would go into the fairy mounds that lay behind the Donegal mountains, not to heaven, purgatory, limbo or hell like the rest of us. These strange destinations excited me, especially when a priest came to the house of a dying person to give the last rites, the sacrament of Extreme Unction. That was to stop the person going to hell. Hell was a deep place. You fell into it, turning over and over in mid-air until the blackness sucked you into a great whirlpool of flames and you disappeared forever.”
― Seamus Deane, Reading in the Dark

“Paradise was not far away when I died”
― Seamus Deane, Reading in the Dark

“The first thing to say about Finnegans Wake is that it is, in an important sense, unreadable.”
― Seamus Deane

“a man who read too many books and disagreed with everybody”
― Seamus Deane, Reading in the Dark

“Some families, Katie told us, are devil-haunted; it's a curse a family can never shake off. Maybe it's something terrible in the family history, some terrible deed that was done in the past, and it just spreads and it spreads down the generations like a shout down a tunnel that echoes and echoes and never really stops.”
― Seamus Deane

“But it is for us to distinguish, to see the difference between wrong done to us and equal wrong done by us; to know that our transient life, no matter how scarred, how broken, how miserable it may be, is also God's miracle and gift; that we may try to improve it, but we may not destroy it.”
― Seamus Deane, Reading in the Dark

“The volume offers an overview of how British writers interpreted the French Enlightenment and Revolution against the backdrop of the Terror and the rise and fall of Napoleon, these events welcomed by few and feared by many in Britain as likely to foment a second revolution in that state as the United Irish insurrection had attempted to do in Ireland. Deane’s focus is on the intellectual careers of Edmund Burke, James Mackintosh, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Godwin, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and William Hazlitt, though there are slighter cameos also of William Wordsworth, Robert Southey, John Wilson Croker, Francis Jeffrey, Thomas Holcroft, Thomas Paine, and Joseph Priestley. The study teases out how the main figures here engaged conceptually with some of their leading French counterparts including Jean Jacques Rousseau, Montesquieu, Baron d’Holbach, La Mettrie, Helvétius, and others. It examines instances of the intricate relay of ideas of freedom and liberty as they migrated from England into the works of the eighteenth-century French philosophes and then travelled from there back to nineteenth-century England, where French writings were rejected or reabsorbed by some of the leading English writers of the apocalyptic years between Burke’s late career and those that ended the first Romantic generation.”
― Seamus Deane, Small World: Ireland, 1798–2018