Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland QUOTES

1 " 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

2 " 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

3 " 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

4 " Claude Lévi-Strauss once observed that, “for the majority of the human species, and for tens of thousands of years, the idea that humanity includes every human being on the face of the earth does not exist at all. The designation stops at the border of each tribe, or linguistic "

― Patrick Radden Keefe , Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland

5 " if you could just get people to talk, he believed, the most bitter antagonists could discover common ground. "

― Patrick Radden Keefe , Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland

6 " 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

7 " Outrage is conditioned not by the nature of the atrocity but by the affiliation of the victim and the perpetrator. Should the state be accorded more leniency because, legally speaking, it has a monopoly on the legitimate use of force? Or, conversely, should we hold soldiers and cops to a higher standard than paramilitaries? "

― Patrick Radden Keefe , Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland

8 " The anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss once observed that, “for the majority of the human species, and for tens of thousands of years, the idea that humanity includes every human being on the face of the earth does not exist at all. The designation stops at the border of each tribe, or linguistic group, sometimes even at the edge of a village. "

― Patrick Radden Keefe , Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland

9 " Once, in the summer of 1995, Adams gave a speech at a rally in Belfast. He looked like a politician, in a crisp summer suit, consulting his cue cards. But during a pause in his prepared remarks, someone in the crowd shouted, "Bring back the IRA!" As the audience cheered, Adams chuckled and smiled. Then he leaned into the microphone and said, "They haven't gone away, you know. "

― Patrick Radden Keefe , Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland

10 " the violence intensified, grandiose funerals became routine, with rousing graveside orations and caskets draped in tricolor flags. People took to joking that there was no social life in Belfast anymore, apart from wakes. "

― Patrick Radden Keefe , Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland

11 " 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

12 " 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

13 " History says, Don’t hope On this side of the grave But then, once in a lifetime The longed-for tidal wave Of justice can rise up And hope and history rhyme. "

― Patrick Radden Keefe , Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland

14 " was rubble and broken glass, what one poet would memorably describe as “Belfast confetti. "

― Patrick Radden Keefe , Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland

15 " Think of the armed struggle as the launch of a boat, Hughes said, getting a hundred people to push this boat out. This boat is stuck in the sand, right, and then get them to push the boat out and then the boat sailing off and leaving the hundred people behind, right. That’s the way I feel. The boat is away, sailing on the high seas, with all the luxuries that it brings, and the poor people that launched the boat are left sitting in the muck and the dirt and the shit and the sand, behind. "

― Patrick Radden Keefe , Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland

16 " It was about the hysteria, the mythmaking, and the misunderstanding that had twisted "

― Patrick Radden Keefe , Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland

17 " But the truth was that most residents still lived in neighborhoods circumscribed by religion, and more than 90 percent of children in Northern Ireland continued to attend segregated elementary schools. "

― Patrick Radden Keefe , Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland

18 " Outrage is conditioned not by the nature of the atrocity but by the affiliation of the victim and the perpetrator "

― Patrick Radden Keefe , Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland

19 " According to one scholar, the “ideal victim” in the Troubles was someone who was not a combatant, but a passive civilian. To many, Jean McConville was the perfect victim: a widow, a mother of ten. To others, she was not a victim at all, but a combatant by proxy, who courted her own fate. Of course, even if one were to concede, for the sake of argument, that McConville was an informer, there is no moral universe in which her murder and disappearance should be justified. Must it be the case that how one perceives a tragedy will forever depend on where one sits? The anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss once observed that, “for the majority of the human species, and for tens of thousands of years, the idea that humanity includes every human being on the face of the earth does not exist at all. The designation stops at the border of each tribe, or linguistic group, sometimes even at the edge of a village.” When it came to the Troubles, a phenomenon known as “whataboutery” took hold. Utter the name Jean McConville and someone would say, What about Bloody Sunday? To which you could say, What about Bloody Friday? To which they could say, What about Pat Finucane? What about the La Mon bombing? What about the Ballymurphy massacre? What about Enniskillen? What about McGurk’s bar? What about. What about. What about. "

― Patrick Radden Keefe , Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland

20 " He must have known, or at least suspected, that she was herself a member of the IRA, but they would argue, amiably, about politics as if they were a couple of graduate students, rather than adversaries in a bloody guerrilla war. At one point, Corden-Lloyd told her that he would love to come back and see her in ten years' time, 'and we could all tell each other the whole truth. "

― Patrick Radden Keefe , Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland