Hidden Symptons Quotes

“She began to think of all the people in Belfast who were drinking or drugging themselves into bearable insensibility that night. People would be hitting other people in the face with broken bottles. People were avowing and making love to people for whom they truly cared nothing; other people were screaming hatred at those whom they really did love. People were destroying things, daubing walls with paint and breaking up telephone boxes; joy-riding stolen cars into stone walls. In hospitals and homes, people were watching others dying, hoping and praying that the inevitable would not happen, while other people were planning murder. People elsewhere were trying to commit suicide, fumbling with change for the gas meter or emptying brown plastic bottles of their pills and tablets, which were bitter and dry in the mouth.

And there are, she thought, there must be, people who think as I do.”
― Deirdre Madden, Hidden Symptons

“Gently he awoke her, kissed her and stroked her; whispered lies in her ear. She murmured and giggled, half-awake and half-sleeping. He desperately wanted to bury his fearful loneliness in the blackness of the room and in her thin, warm body, but sex solved nothing: there was only panic and the illusion of union; nothing could protect him. Now he hated himself for having visited his morbid thoughts of violent death upon this innocent person beside him, four he had not really been thinking about her, nor even about how much her death would mean to him. He was afraid that his own innocent body might be destroyed violently and quickly and he had been too cowardly even to imagine such a thing, visiting his fear upon Kathy instead. Suddenly, incredibly, he wanted to cry.”
― Deirdre Madden, Hidden Symptons

“Ulster before 1969 had been sick but with hidden symptoms. Streets and streets of houses with bricked up windows and broken fanlights, graffiti on gable walls, soldiers everywhere: Belfast was now like a madman who tears his flesh, put straws in his hair and screams gibberish. Before, it had resembled the infinitely more sinister figure of the articulate man in a dark, neat suit whose conversation charms and entertains; and whose insanity is apparent only when he says calmly, incidentally, that he will club his children to death and eat their entrails with a golden fork because God has told him to do so; and then offers you more tea.”
― Deirdre Madden, Hidden Symptons

“What does it profit a man if he gain the whole world but lose his soul?”
― Deirdre Madden, Hidden Symptons

“Something within her, calm and apparently rational, was thinking that it was impossible for her to continue living without him, that she needed him as she needed air. She did not believe that she could bear the loneliness of being in this world without him.”
― Deirdre Madden, Hidden Symptons

“Everything we suffer has been suffered before, everything that gives us joy has been enjoyed before. Nothing is new: but that doesn't make it any easier to suffer.”
― Deirdre Madden, Hidden Symptons

“From that day on, Belfast was poisoned for her. She could not conceive of Francis's killer as an indifividual, as a person who might be arrested, tried and punished, but only as a great darkness which was hidden in the hearts of everyone she met. It was as if the act of murder was so dreadful that the person who committed it had forfeited his humanity and had been reduced to the level of pure evil. He had dragged that world down with him: eveyone was guilty.”
― Deirdre Madden, Hidden Symptons