Troubles Quotes

“Surely there’s no need to abandon one’s reason simply because one is in Ireland.”
― 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

“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

“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

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

“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

“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

“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