Belfast Quotes

“For all Conor Lenihan cared it could have been Osama Bin Laden who had organised the whole thing. He was simply a mercenary doing a job of work.”
― Michael Parker, The Eagle's Covenant

“Soon, Joanna’s strength waned, and she was reduced to loose slaps on his shoulders and cries of: “Tell me where my baby is.” She sobbed and broke down, literally collapsing on top of him. “Please tell me where my baby is.”
― Michael Parker, The Eagle's Covenant

“If you really have to get shot, Belfast is one of the best places to do it. After twenty years of the Troubles, and after thousands of assassination attempts and punishment shootings, Belfast has trained many of the best gunshot-trauma surgeons in the world.”
― Adrian McKinty, Police at the Station and They Don't Look Friendly

“Much of the Irish landscape is dominated by peat bogs; the anaerobic and acidic conditions in the densely packed earth mean that the past in Ireland can be subject to macabre resurrection. Peat cutters occasionally churn up ancient mandibles, clavicles, or entire cadavers that have been preserved for millennia. The bodies date as far back as the Bronze Age, and often show signs of ritual sacrifice and violent death. These victims, cast out of their communities and buried, have surfaced vividly intact, from their hair to their leathery skin. The poet Seamus Heaney, who harvested peat as a boy on his family’s farm, once described the bogs of Ireland as “a landscape that remembered everything that had happened in and to it.”
― Patrick Radden Keefe, Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland

“You are from Belfast; are you sure that was your first time holding a gun?”
― Neil Walker, Drug Gang

“The epidemic was at its worst in Belfast with one in every seven people succumbing to the fever. Donegal Street where we lived was one of the most affluent areas in town but at the foot of the street near the Linen Hall was one of Belfast’s most deprived areas know as the ‘Half Bap’. Here people lived some eight or more people to a house and there were houses backing on to each other with open sewers. It is also said that in the shebeens off York Street that people were so hungry they ate rats alive.”
― LEONORA MORRISON, Red Velvet Rose

“There was a discomfiting sense in Belfast that there was no place where you were truly secure: you would run inside to get away from a gun battle, only to run outside again for fear of a bomb.”
― Patrick Radden Keefe, Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland

“Cheated spouses didn’t get their happily ever after, swindlers didn’t their comeuppance and missing people didn’t want to be found. His business dealt with dishonesty and infidelity, shysters and criminals, the crazies, the addicts and every loser in between, and Jacob knew it was taking a toll.”
― SDW Hamilton, Blood on the Broadcast