Jean Grainger > Quotes

“It wasn’t that people didn’t care – they did – but it was on a scale that seemed impossible to solve.”
― Jean Grainger, The Star and the Shamrock

“You’re a damaged and, in lots of ways, a broken man because you are a good soul who tried to do the right thing. But in a war, the lines of good and bad, right and wrong, are so blurred, it’s impossible to determine which is which.”
― Jean Grainger, Return to Robinswood

“What is your passion?’ Harp asked. ‘If you know what that is, then where you are geographically in the world would be irrelevant.”
― Jean Grainger, Last Port of Call

“no matter what it is, a novel, a law book, an engineering manual, a great piece of classic literature, a banned book even – in fact they are usually worth a read – you can read it. There’s no barrier once you can read, except the ones we put on ourselves, so read whatever you like – there are no rules.”
― Jean Grainger, The Existential Worries of Mags Munroe

“happiness, according to Aristotle anyway, which is the highest of pursuits, is achieved through virtue. So to be virtuous – not in the social sense, but to live to your highest expectations of yourself, your best self – is the route to happiness. So if a person can find the best expression of themselves, then they will be happy.”
― Jean Grainger, Last Port of Call

“The only difference between an Irish funeral and an Irish wedding is that there’s one less drunk.”
― Jean Grainger, The Tour

“The opportunity of a lifetime must be taken in the lifetime of that opportunity”
― Jean Grainger, The Tour

“In my country, we all participated. It is not enough to say that Hitler dragged the rest of us, kicking and screaming, to do his bidding. We did it willingly. That will be the scar that will never heal. Nor should it. We betrayed our neighbours, we took the precious possessions of those people the system deemed to be not in keeping with the perfect Aryan ideal – we did it. Us. The German people. The country that created Wagner and Dürer and Nietzsche also created Himmler, Goebbels and Göring. They didn’t drop from the sky, something alien. No. They were of my people, the Brownshirts who smashed up Jewish property, who humiliated Jews in the streets, who shipped them off to die in conditions that do not even bear thinking about – we all did it. We drove the trains, we sold their clothes, we moved into their houses, we spent their money. And even if we didn’t do those things, we kept our heads down while it all went on around us. All but a small few of us have blood on our hands, and now and for the rest of time, we must pay.”
― Jean Grainger, Return to Robinswood

“Sometimes it’s not until you are out of a situation that you appreciate just how bad it was. It seems we have more in common than we first thought,”
― Jean Grainger, The Tour

“you only get one mother, and no matter what the relationship between you, you’ll miss her when she’s gone. You never really get over it, actually.’ Her”
― Jean Grainger, Shadow of a Century

“You can please some of the people some of the time, but not all of the people all of the time. To my mind, people decide either they are going to have a great time or a miserable time, and there’s very little anyone can do to change it once they have decided on that. I hope you decide you are going to have a great time and that you don’t give a damn what anyone else thinks.”
― Jean Grainger, The Tour

“From the outside, it was barely recognisable. Gaping holes in the walls and piles of smoking rubble had irrevocably altered the once imposing facade of l’Hôpital Saint Germain. The Allied propaganda machine had claimed the Battle of Amiens as a great victory – a turning point, spelling an end to the horrific futility of trench warfare. It was here in Amiens, the victors crowed, that the Germans had stumbled their first steps towards surrender. Yet as Dr Richard Buckley picked his way through the decimated city, he saw nothing about Amiens to suggest a city basking in the glory of victory. Instead, he found himself thinking: So this is what winning looks like. He”
― Jean Grainger, So Much Owed

“As my ma was fond of saying, if wishes were horses, beggars would ride. All we have is now and the hand we’ve been dealt.”
― Jean Grainger, The Future's Not Ours To See

“Siobhán”
― Jean Grainger, The Tour

“All the members of the Poitiers Gestapo, along with high-ranking army officers and their French girlfriends, ate, drank, and sang with such gusto it was hard to imagine there was a war on at all, let alone one they might very conceivably lose. Juliet studied the over made-up faces of the women and feared for them. She would not like to be in their shoes when the liberation finally came. The local people, after suffering years of deprivation and abuse, saw them as unpatriotic whores–‘horizontal collaborators’ was the term used. When the time came, these women would pay dearly. Spitz was holding court, swilling claret, a scantily-”
― Jean Grainger, So Much Owed

“dressed fashionably and smelled of a woody cologne; he was said to be attractive to women, and he could be charming at times. Yet whenever she looked at him, Harp was reminded of the words of Cicero: ‘Ut imago est animi voltus’ – the face is a picture of the mind. That was true in the case of most people, but not her uncle. She never knew what was going on behind those eyes. It felt like a malevolent force. Of course, to be fair, there were things that Ralph Devereaux didn’t know about Harp either, for instance that he wasn’t her uncle – he was her biological father. And therefore that his brother, Henry, had not the right to leave the crumbling family home to Harp when he’d named her as his own daughter”
― Jean Grainger, The West's Awake

“the British people that they were at war, once again, with Germany. That was a month ago. The ‘Phoney War’–as it was being called on the wireless that she and Auntie Kitty listened to each night before bed.”
― Jean Grainger, So Much Owed

“What would you do if the fear was gone?” It is a great question to ask yourself, because once we remove the element of fear from our decisions, then we find our true heart’s desire. Fear takes over if we let it, allowing people to only live half of the life they choose, or sometimes none of it, because they are crippled by terror and”
― Jean Grainger, Letters of Freedom

“James Connolly said that the worker is the slave of capitalist society and the female worker is the slave of that slave,’ said the tiny woman as she unlocked the shop door and let Harp out.”
― Jean Grainger, The West's Awake

“Every single person you meet, no matter how together they look, is trying to manage their own problems, trying to be happy, and hopefully trying to not tear lumps out of anyone else as we do. Everyone has secrets, everyone has a past.”
― Jean Grainger, Finding Billie Romano

“This is a small place and the people here are good, decent, you know, but they don’t trust what they can’t understand. And they can’t understand you, any more than they could understand Henry.”
― Jean Grainger, Last Port of Call

“Adversity is what grows our character, not ease, Billie. I’m a complicated person, but I like who I am. And all of it – my personality, my beliefs, my values – was born out of hardship. People whose lives are too easy become vacuous – the world is full of them. People who care what the neighbours think, or who let petty jealousies rule their lives, they’ve had no real struggles. Surround yourself with people who haven’t had it easy – they are much more interesting.”
― Jean Grainger, Finding Billie Romano

“bookcase, painted with a red poppy, that her mother had made for her; she fetched it”
― Jean Grainger, Lilac Ink

“is hard, I think, for mothers – they want the best thing for their children, but also they want them to be close.”
― Jean Grainger, The Tour

“Dr Warrington told them how, as the biggest department store in Cork, it had been destroyed by the British the night they burnt the city to the ground in 1920 as a punishment for the rebellious actions of the IRA; but the Corkonians were not called the Rebel County for nothing and had built it back up again.”
― Jean Grainger, Lilac Ink

“Her mother had packed each outfit carefully, with tissue paper between each dress to stop it getting wrinkled”
― Jean Grainger, The West's Awake

“easy-going”
― Jean Grainger, The Tour

“The deeply held belief of peace-loving nations in which people had a right to be whoever they wanted, practice whatever faith they wanted, was horribly juxtaposed by the horrors of what Hitler was trying to do.”
― Jean Grainger, The Star and the Shamrock

“There was a piece in a British newspaper about the persecution of Catholics in Germany, which was shocking. Nuns in Nazi prisons, priests in concentration camps, Catholic leaders shot, even cardinals being harassed.”
― Jean Grainger, History's Pages

“War is as much about intelligence as it is about guns and bullets.”
― Jean Grainger, What Once Was True