The Troubles Quotes

“There is a concept in psychology called ‘moral injury,’ notion, distinct from the idea of trauma, that relates to the ways in which ex-soldiers make sense of the socially transgressive things they have done during wartime. Price felt a sharp sense of moral injury: she believed that she had been robbed of any ethical justification for her own conduct.”
― Patrick Radden Keefe, Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland

“Who should be held accountable for a shared history of violence? It was a question that was dogging Northern Ireland as a whole.”
― Patrick Radden Keefe, Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland

“The body is a fantastic machine,’ Hughes told Mackers in one of his Boston College interviews, recounting the grueling sequence of a hunger strike. ‘It’ll eat off all the fat tissue first, then it starts eating away at the muscle, to keep your brain alive.’ Long after Hughes and Price called an end to their strikes and attempted to reintegrate into society, the nursed old grudges and endlessly replayed their worst wartime abominations. In a sense, they never stopped devouring themselves.”
― Patrick Radden Keefe, Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland

“Dating back to the Iliad, ancient Egypt and beyond, burial rites have formed a critical function in most human societies. Whether we cremate a loved one or inter her bones, humans possess a deep-set instinct to mark death in some deliberate, ceremonial fashion. Perhaps the cruelest feature of forced disappearance as an instrument of war is that it denies the bereaved any such closure, relegating them to a permanent limbo of uncertainty.”
― Patrick Radden Keefe, Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland

“The 'voice of sanity' is getting hoarse.”
― Seamus Heaney, North

“Indeed, it could occasionally seem that support for the armed struggle was more fervent in Boston or Chicago than it was in Belfast or Derry. The romantic idyll of a revolutionary movement is easier to sustain when there is no danger that one's own family members might get blown to pieces on a trip to the grocery store. Some people in Ireland looked askance at the "plastic Paddies" who urged bloody war in Ulster from the safe distance of America.”
― Patrick Radden Keefe, Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland

“The short sharp shock of three thousand mother two hundred mothers. The ones who picked through the supermarket debris for pieces of their dead husbands. The ones who still laundered their gone son's bed sheets by hand. The ones who kept an extra teacup at the end of the table, in case of miracles. The elegant ones, the angry ones, the clever ones, the ones in hairnets, the ones exhausted by all the dying. They carried their sorrow - not with photos under their arms, or with public wailing, or by beating their chests, but with a weariness around the eyes. Mothers and daughters and children and grandmothers, too. They never fought the wars, but they suffered them, blood and bone.”
― Colum McCann, TransAtlantic

“And you, Tacitus,
observe how I make my grove
on an old crannog
piled by the fearful dead:

a desolate peace.
Our mother ground
in sour with the blood
of her faithful,

they lie gargling
in her sacred heart
as the legions stare
from the ramparts.

Come back to this
'island of the ocean'
where nothing will suffice.
Read the inhumed faces

of casualty and victim;
report us fairly,
how we slaughter
for the common good

and shave the heads
of the notorious,
how the goddess swallows
our love and terror.
- Kinship”
― Seamus Heaney, North

“This morning from a dewy motorway
I saw the new camp for the internees:
A bomb had left a crater of fresh clay
In the roadside, and over in the trees

Machine-gun posts defined a real stockade.
There was that white mist you get on a low ground
And it was deja-vu, some film made
Of Stalag 17, a bad dream with no sound.

Is there a life before death? That's chalked up
In Ballymurphy. Competence with pain,
Coherent miseries, a bite and sup:
we hug our little destiny again.
-Whatever You Say Say Nothing”
― Seamus Heaney, North

“The famous

Northern reticence, the tight gag of place
And times: yes, yes. Of the "wee six" I sing
Where to be saved you only must save face
And whatever you say, you say nothing.

Smoke-signals are loud-mouthed compared with us:
Manoeuvrings to find out name and school,
Subtle discrimination by addresses
With hardly an exception to the rule

That Norman, Ken and Sidney signalled Prod
And Seamus (call me Sean) was sure-fire Pape.
O land of password, handgrip, wink and nod,
Of open minds as open as a trap,

Where tongues lie coiled, as under flames lie wicks,
Where half of us, as in a wooden horse
Were cabin'd and confined like wily Greeks,
Besieged within the siege, whispering morse.”
― Seamus Heaney, North

“Indeed, it could occasionally seem that support for the armed struggle was more fervent in Boston or Chicago than it was in Belfast or Derry. The romantic idyll of a revolutionary movement is easier to sustain when there is no danger that one's own family members might get blown to pieces on a trip to the grocery store.. Some people in Ireland looked askance at the "plastic Paddies" who urged bloody war in Ulster from the safe distance of America.”
― Patrick Radden Keefe, Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland

“His job, he felt, was to speak for the victims - to represent the next person who might be killed in the conflict. He had no particular party; his only allegiance was to those who had been (and would be) cut down.”
― Patrick Radden Keefe, Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland

“For all the chaos, the number of people actually killed in the Troubles was initially quite low: in 1969, only nineteen people were killed, and in 1970, only twenty-nine. But in 1971, the violence accelerated, with nearly two hundred people killed. By 1972, the figure was nearly five hundred.”
― Patrick Radden Keefe, Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland

“I stuck on the lunchtime news. More riots. Tedious now. Depressing. You ever read Thucycdides? I'll boil him down for you in one easy moral: intergenerational war is a very bad thing.”
― Adrian McKinty

“GERRY: [towards his newborn granddaughter] Y'don't even know your own name. And a bet you've no idea who I am? Y'don't know anything, do ya? You're startin' with a completely new sheet, eh? You're one big blank page, that's what you are. But you're the next page, our kid... you're the next page.

GERRY smiles at his grandchild as the lights fade to Blackout.”
― Martin Lynch, The History of the Troubles

“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

“Sunrise in the Irish Sea, dawn over Dublin Bay
after a stormy night, one shivering star;
and I picture the harsh waking everywhere,
the devastations of a world at war,
airfields, radio silence, a darkened convoy
strung out in moonlight on a glittering sea.”
― Derek Mahon, The Yellow Book