J.g. Farrell Quotes

We look on past ages with condescension, as a mere preparation for us....but what if we are a mere after-glow of them?

Why do people insist on defending their ideas and opinions with such ferocity, as if defending honour itself? What could be easier to change than an idea?

The British could leave and half India wouldn't notice us leaving just as they didn't notice us arriving. All our reforms of administration might be reforms on the moon for all it has to do with them..

Surely there’s no need to abandon one’s reason simply because one is in Ireland.

Culture is a sham,’ he said simply. ‘It’s a cosmetic painted on life by rich people to conceal its ugliness.’ Fleury

Not everyone, the Collector was aware, is improved by the job he does in life; some people are visibly disimproved.

[P]eople are insubstantial. They never last. All this fuss, it's all fuss about nothing. We're here for a while and then we're gone. People are insubstantial. They never last at all.

The Magistrate suffered from the disability of a free-thinking turn of mind and from a life that was barren and dreary to match.

I read somewhere that the boatman who rowed King William back across the river after the Battle of the Boyne is supposed to have asked the King which side won … To which the King replied: “What’s it to you? You’ll still be a boatman.

It seems that’s there a ghastly Darwinian principle of economics known as the Law of Substitution which declares, more or less, that “the cheapest will survive”. This has all sorts of unpleasant consequences, one of which is that non-economic values tend to be eliminated.

A great deal of thought must be given to your daughter's marriage. Otherwise, she will simply slink off like a cat on a dark night to be fertilized under a bush to God knows whom!

How alike we all are, really . . . There's so little difference between one man and another when one comes to think of it.

How few human beings, the major thought with a sigh, can exert by hard work, thrift, intelligence or any other virtue the slightest influence on their own destiny.

The human situation, in general or in particular, is slightly worse (ignoring an occasional hiccup in the graph) at any given moment than at any preceding moment.

He glanced at her, musing on the wonder of a beautiful woman with a disagreeable personality.

War is only a passing phase in business life...If you want my opinion there's nothing like a spot of patriotism for blinding people to reality.

But now the giant heads of Plato and Socrates, each with an expression of penetrating wisdom carved on his white features, surveyed the river and the melon beds beyond.

It is distressing to have to act under the impulsive orders of someone who, in a situation which concerns you deeply, does not know what he is talking about.

Fleury had succeeded (but only with difficulty) in overcoming certain qualms as to whether selling one’s life as dearly as possible, or even putting it up for sale at all, was, in fact, the wisest course

For a day or two Fleury became quite active. He had his book about the advance of civilization in India to consider and this was one reason why he had taken an interest in the behaviour of the Collector. He asked a great number of questions and even bought a notebook to record pertinent information. "Why, if the Indian people are happier under our rule," he asked a Treasury official, "do they not emigrate from those native states like Hyderabad which are so dreadfully misgoverned and come and live in British India?" "The apathy of the native is well known," replied the official stiffly. "He is not enterprising." Fleury wrote down "apathy" in a flowery hand and then, after a moment's hesitation, added "not enterprising".

Did the people of Ireland want to govern themselves? They most certainly did not. They knew on which side their bread was buttered. Ask any decent Irishman what he thinks and he’ll answer the same thing. It was only criminals, fanatics, and certain people with a grudge who were interested in starting trouble.

the Irish War of Independence, which ended with the treaty signed between the British government and Michael Collins’s I.R.A. in 1922. Under the treaty Ireland was partitioned, with twenty-six southern counties becoming a Free State, and the six northern counties remaining under British sovereignty. The result was civil war.

is not to listen to the damned nonsense the natives are always talking.” And poor Burlton flushed with shame and avoided Fleury’s eye. Fleury had by now grown accustomed to the gloom and could see that Ford was a heavy-featured man of about forty; in spite of his inferior social status as an engineer, he clearly dominated Rayne and Burlton.

At the same time he realized with a shock how much his own faith in the Church’s authority, or in the Christian view of the world in which he had hitherto lived his life, had diminished since he had last inspected them. From the farmyard in which his certitudes perched like fat chickens, every night of the siege, one or two were carried off in the jaws of rationalism and despair. Another

And as he dug, he wept. He saw Hari's animated face, and numberless dead men, and the hatred on the faces of the sepoys . . . and it suddenly seemed to him that he could see clearly the basis of all conflict and misery, something mysterious which grows in men at the same time as hair and teeth and brains and which reveals its presence by the utter and atrocious inflexibility of all human habits and beliefs, even including his own.

Things are not yet perfect, of course,’ sighed the Collector. ‘All the same, I should go so far as to say that in the long run a superior civilization such as ours is irresistible. By combining our advances in science and in morality we have so obviously found the best way of doing things. Truth cannot be resisted! Er, that’s to say, not successfully,’ the Collector added as a round shot struck the corner of the roof and toppled one of the pillars of the verandah

What an advantage that knowledge can be stored in books! The knowledge lies there like hermetically sealed provisions waiting for the day when you may need a meal. Surely what the Collector was doing as he pored over his military manuals, was proving the superiority of the European way of doing things, of European culture itself. This was a culture so flexible that whatever he needed was there in a book at his elbow. An ordinary sort of man, he could, with the help of an oil-lamp, turn himself into a great military engineer, a bishop, an explorer or a General overnight, if the fancy took him.

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What an advantage that knowledge can be stored in books! The knowledge lies there like hermetically sealed provisions waiting for the day when you may need a meal. Surely what the Collector was doing as he pored over his military manuals, was proving the superiority of the European way of doing things, of European culture itself. This was a culture so flexible that whatever he needed was there in a book at his elbow. An ordinary sort of man, he could, with the help of an oil-lamp, turn himself into a great military engineer, a bishop, an explorer or a General overnight, if the fancy took him. As the Collector pored over his manuals, from time to time rubbing his tired eyes, he knew that he was using science and progress to help him out of his difficulties and he was pleased. The inventions on his desk, the carriage which supplied its own track and the effervescent drinking vessel, watched him in silent admiration as he worked. The

In Fleury’s day, however, the grass was cut and the graves well cared for. Besides, as you might expect, he was fond of graveyards; he enjoyed brooding in them and letting his heart respond to the abbreviated biographies he found engraved in their stones . . . so eloquent, so succinct! All the same, once he had spent an hour or two pondering by his mother’s grave he decided to call it a day because, after all, one does not want to overdo the lurking in graveyards. This decision was not a very sudden one. From the age of sixteen when he had first become interested in books, much to the distress of his father, he had paid little heed to physical and sporting matters. He had been of a melancholy and listless cast of mind, the victim of the beauty and sadness of the universe. In the course of the last two or three years, however, he had noticed that his sombre and tubercular manner was no longer having quite the effect it had once had, particularly on young ladies. They no longer found his pallor so interesting, they tended to become impatient with his melancholy. The effect, or lack of it, that you have on the opposite sex is important because it tells you whether or not you are in touch with the spirit of the times, of which the opposite sex is invariably the custodian. The truth was that the tide of sensitivity to beauty, of gentleness and melancholy, had gradually ebbed leaving Fleury floundering on a sandbank. Young ladies these days were more interested in the qualities of Tennyson’s “great, broad-shouldered, genial Englishman” than they were in pallid poets, as Fleury was dimly beginning to perceive. Louise Dunstaple’s preference for romping with jolly officers which had dismayed him on the day of the picnic had by no means been the first rebuff of this kind. Even Miriam sometimes asked him aloud why he was looking “hangdog” when once she would have remained silent, thinking “soulful”. All

and at one point they had heard what had sounded mighty like a musket shot which, although not very near, might or might not have been fired in their direction but, they decided, probably had been. Harry clung to this adventure, such as it was, all the more tenaciously when he found that because of his sprained wrist he had missed an adventure at Captainganj. Those of his peers who had escaped with life and limb from the Captainganj parade ground did not seem to be thinking of it as an adventure, those who had managed to escape unhurt were now looking tired and shocked. And they seemed to be having trouble telling Harry what it had been like. Each of them simply had two or three terrible scenes printed on his mind: an Englishwoman trying to say something to him with her throat cut, or a comrade spinning down into a whirl-pool of hacking sepoys, something of that sort. To make things worse, one kept finding oneself about to say something to a friend who was not there to hear it any more. It was hard to make any sense out of what had happened, and after a while they gave up trying. Of the score of subalterns who had managed to escape, the majority had never seen a dead person before . . . a dead English person, anyway . . . one occasionally bumped into a dead native here and there but that was not quite the same. Strangely enough, they listened quite enviously to Harry talking about the musket shot which had “almost definitely” been fired at himself and Fleury. They wished they had had an adventure too, instead of their involuntary glimpse of the abattoir. It

Effectively the country had been portioned out between the Protestants of the North and the Catholics of the South.

The “Troubles” of the title is the euphemism which the Irish—peasant, merchant, or Protestant aristo—applied to the ragged, sporadic, but brutal war that began in 1919 between Sinn Fein/I.R.A. and the British army of occupation.

In fact, that war might be said to have started three years earlier, with the abortive Easter Rising of 1916, which lasted a week and ended with the summary execution of fourteen of its leaders.

Without this purpose our life here below would be nothing more than a random collection of desperate acts . . . I repeat, a random collection of desperate acts.

help them make ends meet when they spend all their money in the pub.

In Ireland you must choose your tribe. Reason has nothing to do with it.

For the important fact was this: the presence of the British signified a moral authority, not just an administrative one, here in Ireland as in India, Africa and elsewhere. It would have to be matched by the natives themselves before self-government became an acceptable proposition. So thought the Major, anyway.

Fleury found himself somewhat embarrassed by this information and to avoid further domestic confidences he inquired if there were many white ants in Calcutta.

ought to be the final object of the exertion of each individual.

In such circumstances nothing could be better guaranteed to pour icy water over the passion of one young person than intimate acquaintance with the other.

her

He remembered declaring that he would come back to her, but not very much else.

The Major only glanced at the newspaper these days, tired of trying to comprehend a situation which defied comprehension, a war without battles or trenches.

explained that the Committee for International Understanding, with Europe crumbling about it, had closed down in 1940, naturally dismayed by the amount of misunderstanding the outbreak of war entailed.

if you were adventurous, scoop out the fragrant, heavenly, alarming flesh of the durian.

For Dupigny a nation resembled a very primitive human being: this human being consisted of, simply, an appetite and some sort of mechanism for satisfying the appetite. In the case of a nation the appetite was usually, if not quite invariably, economic … (now and again the national vanity which at intervals gripped nations like France and Britain would compel them to some act which made no sense economically: but in this respect, too, they resembled human beings). As for the mechanism for fulfilling the appetite, what was that but a nation’s armed forces? The more powerful the armed forces the better the prospects for satiating the appetite; the more powerful the armed forces the more likely (indeed, inevitable, in Dupigny’s view) that an attempt would be made to satiate it; just as heavyweight boxers are more frequently involved in tavern brawls than, say, dentists, so the very existence of power demands that it should be used. His own failure in Indo-China had merely confirmed him in his cynical views. The League of Nations? Nothing but a pious waste of time! ‘Never

Walter, overhearing this, frowned at Dupigny, not because he disbelieved this story, but to indicate that he should speak guardedly in front of the ‘boy’; because if news of the disaster which had befallen Penang, a town which had been British for centuries, should circulate among the natives, what would be the state of their morale? The Major noticed Walter’s frown and knew what he was thinking. But he also knew that Walter’s precaution was futile, for had not Cheong told him of the fall of Penang that morning before anyone else had heard of it? The Major was doubly distressed to think that the Europeans had been evacuated from Penang while the rest of the population had been left to make the best of it. Joan’s

the abnormally solemn face of the impudent;

But Murphy had already turned away and no doubt considered himself to be out of earshot.

There was always a greater shortage of listeners than of talkers

there had always been some corner of the Empire where His Majesty’s subjects were causing trouble)

sadness made him stubborn.

the bath of peeling gilt and black marble in which, no doubt, many a bride of the last century had washed away her illusions of love.

Faith told the Major that Padraig was going about telling the ladies that he would prefer to dress himself in a scarlet cloak and leap from the battlements of the Majestic. The Major told her to tell him on no account to go near the battlements, they weren’t safe. The ornamental façade might give way at any moment.

She had gone to the place where all the famous people go, and the obscure ones too for that matter.

In late 1919 hardly a day went by without an eye-witness account of such horrors being confided to the press by some returned traveller who had managed to escape with his skin.

There is no rock of ages cleft for anyone

a person is only a very temporary and makeshift affair,

people are insubstantial. They really do not ever last . . . They never last. A doctor should know. People never last.

While the 'confident' party recommended calm and indifference, and the 'nervous' party were all for bolting to the Residency, the majority voted now for one course, now for the other, and sometimes even for both at once... a calm and confident bolting to the Residency.

She was very fair and pale and a little remote; one or two people thought her 'insipid', which is a danger blonde people sometimes run.

Fleury was confronted, as he toiled clumsily with the sponging rod in the dust and smoke, with a simple fact about human nature which he had never considered before: nobody is superior to anyone else, he only may be better at doing a specific thing.

Once in her life already she had become attached to someone and had allowed herself to be swept down with him in his lonely vortex into the silent depths where nothing moves but drowned sailors coughing sea-weed; only Miriam herself knew how much it had cost her to ascend again from that fascinating, ghostly world towards light and life.

Miriam was tired of womanhood. She wanted simply to experience life as an anonymous human being of flesh and blood. She was tired of having to adjust to other people's ideas of what a woman should be. And nothing condemned a woman so swiftly to womanhood as grappling with a man.

Perhaps,’ said Matthew dubiously, ‘at some future period men will be able to look back and say, why, it was merely a bitter pill they had to swallow before achieving their present state of felicity, but for the moment, although it’s clear what they’ve lost with their traditional way of life, it’s not so easy to see what they’ve gained. Improved medicine in some places, but mainly to combat new illnesses we’ve brought with us. Education … largely to become unemployable or exploited clerks in the service of our businesses or government departments … And so on.

contiguity,

axiomatic.

to peer too intensely into the gloom, your eyes make you see things which do not exist; Harry and Fleury presently began to have just this experience. If they had not known that it was impossible they

And everyone would climb the stairs chuckling to their rooms and dream of aces and knaves and a supply of trumps that would last for ever and ever, one trump after another, an invincible superiority subject to neither change nor decay nor old age, for a trump will always be a trump, come what may.