Troubles Quotes

“Surely there’s no need to abandon one’s reason simply because one is in Ireland.”
― J.G. Farrell, Troubles

“She had gone to the place where all the famous people go, and the obscure ones too for that matter.”
― J.G. Farrell, Troubles

“Did the people of Ireland want to govern themselves? They most certainly did not. They knew on which side their bread was buttered. Ask any decent Irishman what he thinks and he’ll answer the same thing. It was only criminals, fanatics, and certain people with a grudge who were interested in starting trouble.”
― J.G. Farrell, Troubles

“Without this purpose our life here below would be nothing more than a random collection of desperate acts . . . I repeat, a random collection of desperate acts.”
― J.G. Farrell, Troubles

“the Irish War of Independence, which ended with the treaty signed between the British government and Michael Collins’s I.R.A. in 1922. Under the treaty Ireland was partitioned, with twenty-six southern counties becoming a Free State, and the six northern counties remaining under British sovereignty. The result was civil war.”
― J.G. Farrell, Troubles

“And everyone would climb the stairs chuckling to their rooms and dream of aces and knaves and a supply of trumps that would last for ever and ever, one trump after another, an invincible superiority subject to neither change nor decay nor old age, for a trump will always be a trump, come what may.”
― J.G. Farrell, Troubles

“The Major read this newspaper account and the next day found one or two more. But although it was mentioned in passing once or twice, the murder of the old man had been classified and accepted. It was odd, he thought. An old man is gunned down in the street and within a couple of days this senseless act is both normal and inevitable. It was as if these newspaper articles were poultices placed on sudden inflammations of violence. In a day or two all the poison had been drawn out of them. They became random events of the year 1919, inevitable, without malice, part of history. The old man lying on the bridge with his watch in his hand was a part of history. And thus, the Major reflected-looking out of his window at the bustling traffic of Dame Street, at the gentlemen in bowler hats, at the fine ladies in their billowing dresses, at the flower and fruit sellers, at the ragged women with babies and barefoot children clinging to their skirts begging in the street below "For the Mercy of God"... "For the Holy Vargin!" ... at the gleaming motor cars, at the friendly faces, at the jaunting-cars with their nodding horses and at all the other things which would not be recorded—a particle of the history of this year is formed. A raid on a barracks, the murder of a policeman on a lonely country road, an airship crossing the Atlantic, a speech by a man on a platform, or any of the other random acts, mostly violent, that one reads about every day: this was the history of the time. The rest was merely the "being alive" that every age has to do.”
― J.G. Farrell, Troubles

“There is not so very much difference between an old lady and a young girl, only a few years diluting the exuberance with weariness, sadness, and a great sensitivity to draughts.”
― J.G. Farrell, Troubles

“sadness made him stubborn.”
― J.G. Farrell, Troubles

“There was always a greater shortage of listeners than of talkers”
― J.G. Farrell, Troubles

“Faith told the Major that Padraig was going about telling the ladies that he would prefer to dress himself in a scarlet cloak and leap from the battlements of the Majestic. The Major told her to tell him on no account to go near the battlements, they weren’t safe. The ornamental façade might give way at any moment.”
― J.G. Farrell, Troubles

“the bath of peeling gilt and black marble in which, no doubt, many a bride of the last century had washed away her illusions of love.”
― J.G. Farrell, Troubles

“the abnormally solemn face of the impudent;”
― J.G. Farrell, Troubles

“there had always been some corner of the Empire where His Majesty’s subjects were causing trouble)”
― J.G. Farrell, Troubles

“But Murphy had already turned away and no doubt considered himself to be out of earshot.”
― J.G. Farrell, Troubles

“people are insubstantial. They really do not ever last . . . They never last. A doctor should know. People never last.”
― J.G. Farrell, Troubles

“a person is only a very temporary and makeshift affair,”
― J.G. Farrell, Troubles

“There is no rock of ages cleft for anyone”
― J.G. Farrell, Troubles

“In late 1919 hardly a day went by without an eye-witness account of such horrors being confided to the press by some returned traveller who had managed to escape with his skin.”
― J.G. Farrell, Troubles

“help them make ends meet when they spend all their money in the pub.”
― J.G. Farrell, Troubles

“For the important fact was this: the presence of the British signified a moral authority, not just an administrative one, here in Ireland as in India, Africa and elsewhere. It would have to be matched by the natives themselves before self-government became an acceptable proposition. So thought the Major, anyway.”
― J.G. Farrell, Troubles

“In Ireland you must choose your tribe. Reason has nothing to do with it.”
― J.G. Farrell, Troubles

“In fact, that war might be said to have started three years earlier, with the abortive Easter Rising of 1916, which lasted a week and ended with the summary execution of fourteen of its leaders.”
― J.G. Farrell, Troubles

“The “Troubles” of the title is the euphemism which the Irish—peasant, merchant, or Protestant aristo—applied to the ragged, sporadic, but brutal war that began in 1919 between Sinn Fein/I.R.A. and the British army of occupation.”
― J.G. Farrell, Troubles

“Effectively the country had been portioned out between the Protestants of the North and the Catholics of the South.”
― J.G. Farrell, Troubles

“He remembered declaring that he would come back to her, but not very much else.”
― J.G. Farrell, Troubles