42 Quotes by Anna Burns

According to the police, of course, our community was a rogue community. It was we who were the enemy, we who were the terrorists, the civilian terrorists, the associates of terrorists or simply individuals suspected of being but not yet discovered to be terrorists. That being the case, and understood by both parties to be the case, the only time you’d call the police in my area would be if you were going to shoot them, and naturally they would know this and so wouldn’t come.

People always said you’d better be careful. Though how, when things are out of your hands, when things were never really in your hands, when things are stacked against you, does a person – the little person down here on the earth – be that?

I’d rather you came out with your filthy, unfitting language for the rest of your life than for you to turn out one of them cowardly people who can’t speak their minds but won’t hold their peace and instead mumble behind hands and get their fights out in sneakery and in whispers.

So shiny was bad and ‘too sad’ was bad, and ‘too joyous’ was bad, which meant you had to go around not being anything; also nit thinking, least not at the top level, which was why everybody kept their private thoughts safe and sound in those recesses underneath.

What if one person happened to be sane, longest friend, against a whole background, a race mind, that wasn’t sane, that person would probably be viewed by the mass consciousness as mad – but would that person be mad?

He was leaning over, looking out at me, smiling and friendly by way of being obliging. But by now, by age eighteen, ‘smiling, friendly, and obliging’ always had me straight on the alert.

After generation upon generation, fathers upon forefathers, mothers upon foremothers, centuries and millennia of being one colour officially and three colours unofficially, a colourful sky, just like that, could not be allowed to be.

He’d homed in on that flag issue, the flags-and-emblems issue, instinctive and emotional because flags were invented to be instinctive and emotional – often pathologically, narcissistically emotional – and he meant that flag of the country from ‘over the water’ which was also the same flag of the community from ‘over the road’. It was not a flag greatly welcomed in our community. Not a flag at all welcomed in our community.

Not that she could see, but it was unmistakable not to hear what he looked like.