Tom Phelan > Quotes

“But without it ever having been said, we knew we could depend on each other for a bullet to the head if that ever became a necessity. It takes something beyond the love of brothers to depend on each other to that extreme—maybe it’s just an emotionless acceptance of reality, maybe it’s just behaviour of unabating extreme conditions.”
― Tom Phelan

“I always thought the catechism was wrong where it said man is made in God’s image and likeness; it should have said God is made in man’s image and likeness.”
― Tom Phelan

“If you are different in a small community, your difference is dressed up in kindliness and rendered acceptable, just like all that dreadful leftover pig-stuff gets dressed up in a skin and is called a sausage. Francis of Assiss was saintly because he was batty. I’m batty because I’m feisty. It’s better to be saintly than batty, better to be a batty woman than a feisty one.”
― Tom Phelan

“Out of his mouth was coming a sound that could only have been forged in hell; the sound of a million pieces that had been individually buried and hammered into compression for four long years; it was the sound of pain and agony and death and terror and sadness and starvation and boredom and fear and despair that had been compressed that was now escaping with the terrible admission of what he’d had to do to save his brother.”
― Tom Phelan

“Mister Lacy is a day coward and a night hero, does to people in the dark what he’s afraid to do to them in the light of day.”
― Tom Phelan

“The greenness and the levelness and tidiness of the fields must have been a shock for him, who had lived four years in destroyed and poisoned landscapes without trees or grass; the silence of the countryside must have been deafening to him after years of guns and rifles and screaming horses and pain-roaring men.”
― Tom Phelan

“As sure as shite, Herby knew less about politics than I did, and he was only saying what he’d heard some scuttered Fenian saying in a public house, believed by saying it himself he was being a patriotic Irishman.”
― Tom Phelan

“Dad,” I sobbed as we awkwardly clutched each other, my wet bearded face next to his trembling toothless mouth, the son bending down, the father reaching up, each clutching at something that had slipped out from between them and grasping at it for a fleeting moment.”
― Tom Phelan

“Remember me, Mr. Haig, when they pull the cover off the statue and you see yourself up there being proud on the horse’s back, and listening to the hissing and the booing of the young lads you sent to the butcher, not for a pound of beef, but to get butchered themselves.”
― Tom Phelan

“I kept count with scratches on the handles of the stretcher, the way my father has shown me how to keep count of the fish on the hazel rod when I was small; the side of a tiny box for one point, the bottom for two, the other side for three, the top for four, and from one corner to the other for five, and then onto a new box.”
― Tom Phelan

“There’s times in life when we all need someone to tell us we have gone mad. Everything’s all right now.”
― Tom Phelan

“The thousands of sheaves scattered evenly over the ten acres of the High Field had an effect on me that I can only describe as sphincter-tightening. There were so many sheaves, as if the earth had been ridiculously wasteful in her generosity. In close lines they lay on the ground as far as I could see, the tight twine around the middles giving them the strange appearance of sleeping men who have cinched their belts too tightly. In the terrible silence that had taken over from the reaper and the birds and the insects, the sheaves lay there in the stubbles.”
― Tom Phelan

“The blessing of men and machine was a pleasant little ceremony that had developed over the years in the shadow of the Machine Shed, Catholics and Protestants praying together in a church, the unspoken defiance uniting the participants.”
― Tom Phelan

“I suppose we take a fearful risk when we love, leave ourselves open to the possibility of terrible loss.”
― Tom Phelan

“Of course, the passing years have smoothed the jagged edges of the raw emotion of the times; no one can marinate in such agony for long.”
― Tom Phelan

“There’s more ways of getting killed in a war than by bullets.”
― Tom Phelan