27 quotes found
"The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge Through living roots awaken in my head. But I've no spade to follow men like them. Between my finger and my thumb The squat pen rests. I'll dig with it."
"God is a foreman with certain definite views Who orders life in shifts of work and leisure."
"Human beings suffer, they torture one another, they get hurt and get hard. No poem or play or song can fully right a wrong inflicted or endured."
"History says don't hope On this side of the grave. But then, once in a lifetime The longed for tidal wave Of justice can rise up And hope and history rhyme. So hope for a great sea-change on the far side of revenge. Believe that a further shore is reachable from here. Believe in miracles and cures and healing wells."
"Call the miracle self-healing: The utter self-revealing double-take of feeling. If there's fire on the mountain Or lightning and storm And a god speaks from the sky That means someone is hearing the outcry and the birth-cry of new life at its term."
"Here is the great paradox of poetry and of the imaginative arts in general. Faced with the brutality of the historical onslaught, they are practically useless. Yet they verify our singularity, they strike out the ore of self which lies at the base of every individuated life. In one sense the efficacy of poetry is nil – no lyric has ever stopped a tank. In another sense it is unlimited. It is like the writing in the sand in the face of which accusers and accused are left speechless and renewed."
"My poetry journey into the wilderness of language was a journey where each point of arrival turned out to be a stepping stone rather than a destination."
"The writing of certain poems took me to the bottom of myself, something inchoate but troubled. [...] The Troubles, you might say, had muddied the waters, but I felt these poems ["The Guttural Muse" and others] arrived from an older, deeper, cleaner spring."
"I don't mean sound as decoration or elaboration, but the actual cadence that moves the thing along."
"Is there life before death? That's chalked up In Ballymurphy. Competence with pain, Coherent miseries, a bite and a sup, We hug our little destiny again."
"I rhyme To see myself, to set the darkness echoing."
"Don't be surprised if I demur, for, be advised My passport's green. No glass of ours was ever raised To toast The Queen."
"Don't be afraid."
"A poet for whom sound is crucial, who relishes the way words and consonants knock around together."
"Heaney has the rare capacity to improvise sentences which are at once spontaneous and shapely, play and profound, beautiful and true."
"För ett författarskap av lyrisk skönhet och etiskt djup, som lyfter fram vardagens mirakler och det levande förflutna."
"I didn’t find the voices in published literature in Australia that could show me the way...Heaney felt like a mentor I wish I had while I was trying to write."
"I don't think that you can be an artist if you are simply trying to gauge what the acceptable point of view is. Or, indeed, if you are using your art as a conduit to express whatever the vogueish ideology of the time happens to be. And that is what has happened. If you go to any theatrical production in the [United Kingdom] now, nine times out of ten it will be a sermon disguised as a piece of entertainment."
"You have a minority of activists with incredible power in society who are treating their own extremist views and presenting them as though we've reached an established consensus in society, and it's not true."
"What the activists did to comedy insofar is they were expecting audiences to sit there, hear the joke, assess whether it was morally pure, and then laugh to endorse the point being made. And that's not how laughter works."
"If you're looking for a Disneyfied world of goodies and baddies, Shakespeare isn't for you. But this is precicely the world imagined by the high priests of critical social justice, those killjoys who have invaded the theatre industry and seek to deprive us of our cakes and ale. You're either in lockstep with every aspect of their doctrine, or you're on the wrong side of history. And when an ideology captures an organization, that organization ceases to function effectively and becomes a mere conduit for the propagation of the creed."
"When the fashionable beliefs of our time are imposed onto historical works of art, they are invariably denuded of much of their profundity."
"We were touching a raw nerve. Women in Ireland wanted contraception. I mean, six children on average. Or maybe more."
"It was massive that the crowd agreed with us because it was against the church. You just knew it resonated with women who thought "I needn’t get pregnant"."
"It was never a condom train. We were never going to give control of our sexuality to men."
"Her passion and wrath was not scattergun – it had a laser-like focus on calling out inequality and injustice. She suffered no fools but had a kindness and warmth for many."
"As one of the women who took the train in 1971, she set in train an unstoppable wave for equality and a changing of Ireland for the better. That change has not yet reached its conclusion but it would be nowhere if it wasn't for warriors like Nell. In an Ireland trying to emerge from the shadows and find who it was, Nell McCafferty was one of the people who knew exactly who she was and wasn't afraid to enter every battle for gay and women's rights. We all owe her a great debt for this. Nell McCafferty left Ireland a much better place than she found it and she played her part with spirit and style."