The Speckled People Quotes

“Maybe your country is only a place you make up in your own mind. Something you dream about and sing about. Maybe it's not a place on the map at all, but just a story full of people you meet and places you visit, full of books and films you've been to. I'm not afraid of being homesick and having no language to live in. I don't have to be like anyone else. I'm walking on the wall and nobody can stop me.”
― Hugo Hamilton, The Speckled People: A Memoir of a Half-Irish Childhood

“One day, my father said there was nothing outside infinity. He said the universe was like a cardboard box with God sitting outside surrounded by light, but I wanted to know if maybe God was sitting inside another cardboard box with the light on, and how could anyone be sure how many cardboard boxes there are.”
― Hugo Hamilton, The Speckled People: A Memoir of a Half-Irish Childhood

“-Nobody can force you to smile, she says.
-What? I ask. But I know she's not even talking to me, only to herself, as if she's the last person left in the room.
-They can make you show your teeth, but what good is that? Nobody can make you smile against your will.”
― Hugo Hamilton, The Speckled People: A Memoir of a Half-Irish Childhood

“When you're small you can inherit a secret without even knowing what it is. You can be trapped in the same film as your mother, because certain things are passed on to you that you're not even aware of, not just a smile or a voice, but unspoken things, too, that you can't understand until later when you grow up. Maybe it's there in my eyes for all to see, the same as it is in my mother's eyes. Maybe it's hidden in my voice, or in the shape of my hands. Maybe it's something you carry with you like a precious object you're told not to lose.”
― Hugo Hamilton , The Speckled People

“You have to measure everything twice because you can only cut once.”
― Hugo Hamilton, The Speckled People: A Memoir of a Half-Irish Childhood

“dream in Irish. We laugh in Irish and we cry in German. We are silent in German and we speak in English. We are the speckled people.”
― Hugo Hamilton, The Speckled People

“We are the brack children. Brack, homemade Irish bread with German raisins. We are the brack people and we don’t just have one briefcase. We don’t just have one language and one history.”
― Hugo Hamilton, The Speckled People

“My father was a schoolteacher once before he became an engineer and breac is a word, he explains, that the Irish people brought with them when they were crossing over into the English language. It means speckled, dappled, flecked, spotted, coloured. A trout is brack and so is a speckled horse. A barm brack is a loaf of bread with raisins in it and was borrowed from the Irish words bairín breac. So we are the speckled-Irish, the brack-Irish. Brack home-made Irish bread with German raisins.”
― Hugo Hamilton, The Speckled People

“If it’s the two men in suits with Bibles then he slams it shut to make sure not even one of their words enters into the hall.”
― Hugo Hamilton, The Speckled People

“My father also likes to slam the front door from time”
― Hugo Hamilton, The Speckled People

“My father talks about people dying on coffin ships going to America and my mother talks about people dying on trains going to Poland. My father says our people died in the famine and my mother says those who died under the Nazis are our people, too. Everybody has things they can't forget.”
― Hugo Hamilton, The Speckled People: A Memoir of a Half-Irish Childhood

“They speak like that because they're afraid of the Irish language coming back and killing everybody in the country this time. He [my father] says Irish people drink too much and talk too much and don't want to speak Irish, because it stinks of poverty and dead people left lying in the fields. That's why they speak posh English and pretend that nothing ever happened.”
― Hugo Hamilton, The Speckled People: A Memoir of a Half-Irish Childhood

“...Dead people have the best conversations of all. Lots of people don't really speak until they're dead, because only then can they say all the things to each other in the graveyard that they have been keeping a secret all their lives.”
― Hugo Hamilton, The Speckled People: A Memoir of a Half-Irish Childhood