18 Quotes by Patrick Radden Keefe

As Dolours struggled in the water, she locked eyes with one attacker, a man with a club, and for the rest of her life she would return to that moment, the way his eyes were glazed with hate. She looked into those eyes and saw nothing.

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.

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.

I think Upton Sinclair once wrote that a man has difficulty understanding something if his salary depends on his not understanding.

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

In 1689, Protestant forces loyal to William of Orange, the new king, had managed to hold the city against a siege by a Catholic army loyal to James II.

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

But even if your parents were ardent supporters of the IRA, there were reasons not to tell them that you had joined. If the police or the army broke down the door to interrogate them, the less they knew, the better.

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.