Belfast Quotes

After the allied victory of 1918, at the end of my father's war, the victors divided up the lands of their former enemies. In the space of just seventeen months, they created the borders of Northern Ireland, Yugoslavia and most of the Middle East. And I have spent my entire career - in Belfast and Sarajevo, in Beirut and Baghdad - watching the people within those borders burn. ~ Robert Fisk

She began to think of all the people in Belfast who were drinking or drugging themselves into bearable insensibility that night. People would be hitting other people in the face with broken bottles. People were avowing and making love to people for whom they truly cared nothing; other people were screaming hatred at those whom they really did love. People were destroying things, daubing walls with paint and breaking up telephone boxes; joy-riding stolen cars into stone walls. In hospitals and homes, people were watching others dying, hoping and praying that the inevitable would not happen, while other people were planning murder. People elsewhere were trying to commit suicide, fumbling with change for the gas meter or emptying brown plastic bottles of their pills and tablets, which were bitter and dry in the mouth.

And there are, she thought, there must be, people who think as I do. ~ Deirdre Madden

Star"

Tony went to fight in Belfast
Rudi stayed at home to starve
I could make it all worthwhile
as a rock & roll star
Bevan tried to change the nation
Sonny wants to turn the world, well he can tell you that
he tried
I could make a transformation as a rock & roll star

[CHORUS (x2)]
So inviting - so enticing to play the part
I could play the wild mutation
as a rock & roll star
I could do with the money
I'm so wiped out with things as they are
I'd send my photograph to my honey - and I'd c'mon like
a regular superstar

I could fall asleep at night
as a rock & roll star
I could fall in love all right
as a rock & roll star ~ David Bowie

Listen, I'm from Belfast. We're not polite people. And it's language. We're direct. ~ Paula Malcomson

I really love it in Belfast. I always stay in the most bombed hotel, the Europa! ~ Gareth Gates

I think the poetry that came out of Belfast, and especially the Queen's University set, in the 1970s and '80s - you know, Paul Muldoon and Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon and Ciaran Carson - that was probably the finest body of work since the Gaelic renaissance, up there with the work of Yeats and Synge and Lady Gregory. ~ Adrian McKinty

There is an old Belfast joke about the man stopped at a roadblock and asked his religion. When he replies that he is an atheist he is asked, Protestant or Catholic atheist? ~ Christopher Hitchens

I've never read anything set in Belfast that doesn't involve the Troubles or something senseless over a flag. ~ Jamie Dornan

All you would hear every night on the news was that somebody had been shot dead in a certain part of Belfast. We lived opposite a judge, and there were always soldiers crouched down in our garden. We'd sit and talk to them, and I even used to sing to them! ~ Rachel Tucker

THERE IS an old saying that in Belfast it rains five days out ~ Jack Higgins

I suspect that the only thing that will take Articles Two and Three out of the Irish Constitution is when the bombs begin to blow in Dublin in the way that they have been in Belfast and in London. ~ Norman Tebbit

The really big challenge is delivering the social justice agenda in the Belfast Agreement, which hasn't been delivered. ~ Mike Nesbitt

My dad moved to London in his early 20s and didn't really go back. So the irony is I've spent lots and lots of time in Ireland, but not with my dad. I've shot films in Belfast, where he's from. And I've shot in Dun Laoghaire. Which is great. And I've shot in Dublin. ~ Imogen Poots

This was how it had to be. The city centre had to be for all religions, and so the ubiquitous, shinning, grey had quickly become the nascent colour. Whereas the the Ardoyne rejoced in the tricolours and every shade of green, so too the Shankill kept their houses and kerbs in the Union Jack, and each side of the divided city painted their gables and drenched themselves in the rich colours which formed their history, their protection, their identity, their, and they lived under the terrible weight that came with it. In Belfast, colour was joyful, territorial, and frightening. And so the heart of the city embraced a comforting blanket of grey. ~ Steve Cavanagh

There are some discussions taking place in the United Arab Emirates about the prospects of a long-haul flight into Belfast. ~ Martin McGuinness

Is it true or false that Belfast is north of London? That the galaxy is the shape of a fried egg? That Beethoven was a drunkard? That Wellington won the battle of Waterloo? There are various degrees and dimensions of success in making statements: the statements fit the facts always more or less loosely, in different ways on different occasions for different intents and purposes. ~ J.L. Austin

I'm just a normal working class boy from Belfast. ~ Kenneth Branagh

I think that we live in a remarkably networked world. The problem with that, of course, is that tensions can travel in nanoseconds across the Internet, and so the tensions between Shiites and Sunnis in Baghdad, or between Protestants and Catholics in Belfast - those show up in different parts of the world. ~ Eboo Patel

When I play discos in Belfast or freshers' week in Oxford, there are 1,800 kids dressed as me. It's odd, it's funny, and it pays really well. ~ David Hasselhoff

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

Ireland, like Ukraine, is a largely rural country which suffers from its proximity to a more powerful industrialised neighbour. Ireland's contribution to the history of tractors is the genius engineer Harry Ferguson, who was born in 1884, near Belfast.
Ferguson was a clever and mischievous man, who also had a passion for aviation. It is said that he was the first man in Great Britain to build and fly his own aircraft in 1909. But he soon came to believe that improving efficiency of food production would be his unique service to mankind. Harry Ferguson's first two-furrow plough was attached to the chassis of the Ford Model T car converted into a tractor, aptly named Eros. This plough was mounted on the rear of the tractor, and through ingenious use of balance springs it could be raised or lowered by the driver using a lever beside his seat. Ford, meanwhile, was developing its own tractors. The Ferguson design was more advanced, and made use of hydraulic linkage, but Ferguson knew that despite his engineering genius, he could not achieve his dream on his own. He needed a larger company to produce his design. So he made an informal agreement with Henry Ford, sealed only by a handshake. This Ford-Ferguson partnership gave to the world a new type of Fordson tractor far superior to any that had been known before, and the precursor of all modern-type tractors. However, this agreement by a handshake collapsed in 1947 when Henry Ford II took over the empire of his father, and st ~ Marina Lewycka

There was a time in my life when I did a fair bit of work for the tempestuous Lucretia Stewart, then editor of the American Express travel magazine, Departures. Together, we evolved a harmless satire of the slightly driveling style employed by the journalists of tourism. 'Land of Contrasts' was our shorthand for it. ('Jerusalem: an enthralling blend of old and new.' 'South Africa: a harmony in black and white.' 'Belfast, where ancient meets modern.') It was as you can see, no difficult task. I began to notice a few weeks ago that my enemies in the 'peace' movement had decided to borrow from this tattered style book. The mantra, especially in the letters to this newspaper, was: 'Afghanistan, where the world's richest country rains bombs on the world's poorest country.'

Poor fools. They should never have tried to beat me at this game. What about, 'Afghanistan, where the world's most open society confronts the world's most closed one'? 'Where American women pilots kill the men who enslave women.' 'Where the world's most indiscriminate bombers are bombed by the world's most accurate ones.' 'Where the largest number of poor people applaud the bombing of their own regime.' I could go on. (I think number four may need a little work.) But there are some suggested contrasts for the 'doves' to paste into their scrapbook. Incidentally, when they look at their scrapbooks they will be able to re-read themselves saying things like, 'The bombing of Kosovo is driving the Serbs int ~ Christopher Hitchens

Niall Lynch was a braggart poet, a loser musician, a charming bit of hard luck bred in Belfast but born in Cumbria, and Ronan loved him like he loved nothing else. ~ Maggie Stiefvater

I grew up in leafy suburbs in north and east Belfast, but if I had been born a mile down the road closer to the city centre, you might never heard of me. ~ Mike Nesbitt

East Germany brought down their wall in 1989 as a sign of surrender. The Soviet experiment had failed, and the Eastern bloc realized they couldn't win the Cold War. The falling Berlin Wall was their white flag. The walls I'd visited, though, expressed the opposite. The rising of these walls was the surrender. The walls stood as evidence that their conflicts were unwinnable and permanent. When diplomacy and negotiation crumbles, when the motivation to find solutions wanes and dies, when governments resign themselves to failure, the walls go up. Instead of trying to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, we build a wall. Instead of finding a way for Catholics and Protestants to live together in Belfast, we build a wall. Instead of addressing the despair that leads migrants across our borders, we build a wall. The walls admit our defeat. We throw up a wall right after we throw up our hands. ~ Marcello Di Cintio

The riot had taken on a beauty of its own now. Arcs of gasoline fire under the crescent moon. Crimson tracer in mystical parabolas. Phosphorescence from the barrels of plastic bullet guns. A distant yelling like that of men below decks in a torpedoed prison ship. The scarlet whoosh of Molotovs intersecting with exacting surfaces. Helicopters everywhere: their spotlights finding one another like lovers in the Afterlife.
And all this through a lens of oleaginous Belfast rain. ~ Adrian McKinty

I went back to Belfast and started a club, the Maritime. No one had thought about doing a blues club, so I was the first. ~ Van Morrison

I went to Queen's University Belfast and stayed nine months, then I ran away to be an actor. ~ Simon Callow

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

People fell in love with Alex Higgins, a working-class fellow from the back streets of Belfast. That's what brought the game alive. ~ John Higgins

When we went to Belfast we saw some beautiful countryside and coastlines. ~ Sarah Sutton

Hoodwink is a product of his environment. He grew up in Belfast, he was part of the UDA and he fought for what he believed in - or was brainwashed into believing - because of the people that surrounded him. ~ Andy Serkis

When I retired from the circus at the grand old age of 11, my parents thought it would be best to focus more on the challenges ahead, and so I started at Methodist College Belfast. ~ Ian Beattie

I started to watch 'Play for Today' and plays like 'Cathy Come Home,' and Kenneth Branagh's 'Billy' trilogy in the 1980s, which took us into the world of the Belfast family. As a kid in Luton, how was I ever going to know that world otherwise? ~ Colin Salmon

On September 11, it was government that failed. Law enforcement agencies didn't detect the plot. The FBI had reports that said young men on the terrorist watch list were going from flight school to flight school, trying to find an instructor who would teach them how to fly a commercial jet. But the FBI never acted on it. The INS let the hijackers in. Three of them had expired visas. Months after the attack, the government issued visas to two dead hijackers.
The solution to such government incompetence is to give the government more power?
Congress could have done what Amsterdam, Belfast, Brussels, Copenhagen, Frankfurt, Hamburg, London, Paris, and Rome did: set tough standards and let private companies compete to meet them. Many of those cities switched to private companies because they realized government-run security wasn't working very well. Private-sector competition keeps the screeners alert because the airport can fire them. No one can fire the government; that's a reason government agencies gradually deteriorate. There's no competition. ~ John Stossel

Make up your mind as she makes up her face
She'll never really know her place
You'll lay on her frame and give her a new name
And bless her with all you can spare
Empty as wire, violent as fire
You'll carve her out of thin air

She's crashed home and cruised your world
But you can't get the Belfast out of the girl
This is how you throw her, you think you know her
Empty as wire, violent as fire

She hasn't left you yet but she will
By airplane ticket or kill-me pills
Sewn into her dress, she can't refuse
(careful what you love, what you abuse)
She knows violence, she knows please
Her hands for cuffing and she says nothing
And hooks her hands behind her knees

You fuck her flag and feel it unfurl
But you can't get the Belfast out of the girl. ~ Nicole Blackman

I have often noticed that nationalism is at its strongest at the periphery. Hitler was Austrian, Bonaparte Corsican. In postwar Greece and Turkey the two most prominent ultra-right nationalists had both been born in Cyprus. The most extreme Irish Republicans are in Belfast and Derry (and Boston and New York). Sun Yat Sen, father of Chinese nationalism, was from Hong Kong. The Serbian extremists Miloševic and Karadžic were from Montenegro and their most incendiary Croat counterparts in the Ustashe tended to hail from the frontier lands of Western Herzegovina. ~ Christopher Hitchens

Belfast during the Troubles looked like a different world. ~ Clive Owen

Belfast is a city which, while not forgetting its past, is living comfortably with its present and looking forward to its future. ~ James Nesbitt

When I was growing up, Belfast City Hall was surrounded by security, and we had no access to it. But now, people come in and out of it all the time. On a nice day, office workers and students sit on the lawn outside and have lunch. It's great to see how Northern Ireland has changed. To be part of that is fantastic. ~ James Nesbitt

On my Wikipedia page, it used to say I was born in Belfast, Ireland, then it said Belfast, Northern Ireland, and then it said Belfast, U.K. So there was a little war going on about where Belfast is located. ~ Adrian McKinty

I certainly notice the vitality in Belfast, which wasn't there in the Seventies. There was a war going on then. Now there are cranes everywhere. There really is a sense of renewal and hope. ~ Liam Neeson