Borstal Boy Quotes

“It's a queer world, God knows, but the best we have to be going on with.”
― Brendan Behan, Borstal Boy

“I didn’t spend a lifetime studying theology, but I know that the Church was always against Ireland and for the British Empire.”
― Brendan Behan, Borstal Boy

“If I was willing to serve Mass, it was in memory of my ancestors standing around a rock, in a lonely glen, for fear of the landlords and their yeomen, or sneaking through a back-lane in Dublin, and giving the pass-word, to hear Mass in a slum public-house, when a priest’s head was worth five pounds and an Irish Catholic had no existence in law.”
― Brendan Behan, Borstal Boy

“Liars need good memories, and I have one.”
― Brendan Behan, Borstal Boy

“But the best book I ever saw in the nick was the Bible. When I was in Brixton on remand, I ’ad one in the flowery. Smashing thin paper for rolling dog-ends in. I must ’ave smoked my way through the book of Genesis, before I went to court.”
― Brendan Behan, Borstal Boy

“People take to hard work as easily as to drink. It’s a matter of getting used to it. It didn’t make them like Tom a”
― Brendan Behan, Borstal Boy

“A good start is half the work.”
― Brendan Behan, Borstal Boy

“Me blood was up and me country in my knuckles”
― Brendan Behan, Borstal Boy

“He was a dark man, not very old, and very hard in an English way that tries to be dignified and a member of a master race that would burn a black man alive or put a pregnant woman out the side of the road in the interests of stern duty.”
― Brendan Behan, Borstal Boy

“Compliments pass when the quality meet.”
― Brendan Behan, Borstal Boy

“I’ll James you, you foxy-faced drippings of a cankered __, you poxy bastarding whore’s melt, I put it to myself, and thought it worth it to hit him a belt; but, when all is said and done, I was but sixteen and he was a grown man and had come through Borstal institutions, mostly, I would say, by sucking up to bullying big bollixes the likes of Dale, not by letting his backstraps down—he was too ugly for that, but maybe some of these bastards would get a bit of a drop.

I was no country Paddy from the middle of the Bog of Allen to be frightened to death by a lot of Liverpool seldom-fed bastards, nor was I one of your wrap-the-green-flag-round-me junior Civil Servants that came into the IRA from the Gaelic League, and well ready to die for their country any day of the week, purity in their hearts, truth on their lips, for the glory of God and the honour of Ireland. No, be Jesus, I was from Russell Street, North Circular Road, Dublin, from the Northside where, be Jesus, the likes of Dale wouldn’t make a dinner for them, where the whole of this pack of Limeys would be scruff-hounds would be et, bet, and threw up again __et without salt. I’ll James you, you bastard.

Then the smile had to fade and the joke was rejected and the gentleness refused, never a better nor my own sweet self, and it wasn’t off the stones I licked. The old fellow would beat the best of them round our way and him only my height now, though fully grown a hell of a long time. James, be Jesus, prepare to meet thy Jesus. And I just stood up, held up a bag and said, ‘Finished work,’ and the screw nodded, though I hadn’t said ‘sir’ because I hadn’t time.”
― Brendan Behan, Borstal Boy

“It’s great to be on your own for a bit, in the sun, and in the country. That’s one thing you never were in Walton. Nor in any prison, I suppose. For all their solitary confinement you were watched and your every movement – even at times when you’d give a dog a bit of privacy. What they call in Irish—’uaigneas gan ciuneas’— loneliness without peace.”
― Brendan Behan, Borstal Boy

“I always get grateful and pious in good weather and this was the kind of day you'd know that Christ for you.”
― Brendan Behan, Borstal Boy

“But the hair style didn’t frighten me, for he was long enough out of Sherwood for it to have grown again, and he must be keeping it that way, to scare people; which it did, but not this citizen.”
― Brendan Behan, Borstal Boy

“It was more luck than good management”
― Brendan Behan, Borstal Boy

“This, in the language of the poet, is where he dropped a ballock.”
― Brendan Behan, Borstal Boy

“I jumped to one side and before he could rise properly gave him a kick from each boot into the guts. I could not get the side of his head because the bastard was cute enough to have that above the level of my boot. Then I struck him with my head in the face as often as I could, for this was my only chance with this fughpig. He tried to rise and got his arm around my neck and threw me with me under him and tried to get his knee in but my thigh
was covering my balls. This, said I, in my own mind, is where Brendan goes down for the third time, and if he does he does not come up.

‘Up, up! Out of it, you pair of bloody savages.’

Tessie O’Shea, me life on you, sweetest voice in the land of Erin, or East Anglia or any goddamn place. He came down into the cutting and pulled Parry up. He got in a last dig at me as his grip was loosened, and I went for him with my fists, letting on there was still tight in me.

The screw (that he may be blessed now and for ever more, amen) caught the two of us by the scruff of the neck—or the scruffs of our necks, for now that it was over and Parry damaged a little bit, I was lightheaded and happy—and he said, ‘You dirty pair of animals.”
― Brendan Behan, Borstal Boy

“How's the body, kid?”
― Brendan Behan, Borstal Boy

“I'd be like God and pay my debts without money, with a good kick up in the ball for a beginning, what they called in the slums at home 'a Ringsend uppercut'.”
― Brendan Behan, Borstal Boy

“I was like a man gaining money with each day that brought me towards the spring.”
― Brendan Behan, Borstal Boy

“Grip tight and hold on, said Tom Clark. I'd do my best. Clarke held on for fifteen years, and lived to fight the bastards on more equal terms in Easter Week.”
― Brendan Behan, Borstal Boy

“One of the Fenian prisoners said the things you missed most in jail were babies, dogs and fires.”
― Brendan Behan, Borstal Boy

“I sat beside Charlie. Opposite us, in the Black Maria, was a red-haired boy of my own age, and a small man with a broken nose, a cauliflower ear, and a begrudging look. He was going up for kicking his wife. He was not unfriendly, and told me his name was Donohoe. I said that by a coincidence that was my mother’s name. It was not her name, but civility costs nothing.”
― Brendan Behan, Borstal Boy

“Don’t ’oo call me a Culchie,’ said Parry between his teeth, and ferociously, but he could have said it from between the two cheeks of his arse, and twice as ferociously at that stage of the game, for all I cared. Because I had him weighed up and it was clearly a case of have him now or be persecuted by him for as long as I’d be within reach of him. Now, it was, or never, as the man said; die dog or shite the licence.”
― Brendan Behan, Borstal Boy