people-from-belfast

"They said: "She dwelleth in some place apart, Immortal Truth, within whose eyes Who looks may find the secret of the skies And healing for life's smart."I sought Her in loud caverns underground,— On heights where lightnings flashed and fell; I scaled high Heaven; I stormed the gates of Hell, But Her I never foundTill thro' the tumults of my Quest I caught A whisper: "Here, within thy heart, I dwell; for I am thou: behold, thou art The Seeker and the Sought.""

"When I from life's unrest had earned the grace Of utter ease beside a quiet stream; When all that was had mingled in a dream To eyes awakened out of time and place; Then in the cup of one great moment's space Was crushed the living wine from things that seem; I drank the joy of very Beauty's gleam, And saw God's glory face to shining face.Almost my brow was chastened to the ground, But for an inner Voice that said: "Arise! Wisdom is wisdom only to the wise: Thou art thyself the Royal thou hast crowned: In Beauty thine own beauty thou hast found, And thou hast looked on God with God's own eyes.""

"For sorrow and joy are one, and all the past And all the future mingle in a kiss."

"All my novels are about moral questions ... Most of us want to believe in something: politics, religion, saving the world, and there comes a point in people's lives, usually in their 30's, when their faith is shaken in that belief. A lot of my books have dealt with that moment of crisis. Because I've tried to be truthful, the s rarely solve their problems."

"was the great day of the week. To begin with, there was , early Mass with Holy Communion, or a late Mass where you were likely to see a lot of people. The special thing about Sunday Mass was that for once everyone was doing the same thing. Age, income, station in life, it made no difference: you all went to Mass, said the same prayers and listened to the same sermons. Miss Hearne put loneliness aside on a Sunday morning."

"She came out near the and turned hastily back towards the . The docks were no place for a woman to be wandering about, in among all those rough pubs and the Salvation Army. At , the clock said half-past four. Go home. She walked back toward Camden Street. It began to drizzle but she was thinking about money, so she paid it no heed."

"The street outside was a university bywater, once a good residential area, which had lately been reduced to the level of taking in paying guests. Miss Hearne stared at the houses opposite and thought of her aunt's day when there were only private families in this street, at least one maid to every house, and dinner was at night, not at noon. All gone now, all those people dead and all the houses partitioned off into flats, the bedrooms cut in two, kitchenettes jammed into linen closets, linoleum on the floors and 'To Let' cards in the the s."

"The ways of destroying a ship are developing far faster than the methods of protection."

"I loved the exuberance of the place. A sense of liberation and love of life penetrated every room. His home was like his poetry, full of hints of fantasy, allegory and hedonism. Neruda's presence was everywhere writ large on the house. He had build it, seemingly haphazardly without any architect's plans or permission from authority. In a sense, the house had the same structure as a poem on first reading — awkward and confused. Yet wandering through it was like wandering through his poems. Suddenly everything fell in to place. A romantic avant-garde poet could not have lived anywhere else."

"This is a city of the muses. For poets, painters and composers. This is the artists' enclave. This is Venice and Florence waiting to be explored, and I dream it still."

"But wait. My eyes are almost burned by what I see. There’s a bowl in front of me that wasn’t there before. A brown button bowl and in it some apricots, some small oranges, some nuts, cherries, a banana. The fruits, the colours, mesmerize me in a quiet rapture that spins through my head. I am entranced by colour. I lift an orange into the flat filthy palm of my hand and feel and smell and lick it. The colour orange, the colour, the colour, my God the colour orange. Before me is a feast of colour. I feel myself begin to dance, slowly, I am intoxicated by colour. I feel the colour in a quiet somnambulant rage. Such wonder, such absolute wonder in such an insignificant fruit. I cannot, I will not eat this fruit. I sit in quiet joy, so complete, beyond the meaning of joy. My soul finds its own completeness in that bowl of colour. The forms of each fruit. The shape and curl and bend all so rich, so perfect. I want to bow before it. Loving that blazing, roaring, orange colour...Everything meeting in a moment of colour and form, my rapture no longer abstract euphoria. It is there in that tiny bowl, the world recreated in that broken bowl. I feel the smell of each fruit leaping into me and lifting me and carrying me away. I am drunk with something that I understand but cannot explain. I am filled with a sense of love. I am filled and satiated by it. What I have waited and longed for has without my knowing come to me, and taken all of me. For days I sit in a kind of dreamy lethargy, in part contemplation and in part worship. The walls seem to be singing. I focus all of my attention on the bowl of fruit. At times I fondle the fruits, at times I rearrange them, but I cannot eat them. I cannot hold the ecstasy of the moment and its passionate intensity. It seems to drift slowly from me as the place in which I am being held comes back to remind me of where I am and of my condition. But my containment does not oppress me. I sit and look at the walls but now this room seems so expansive, it seems I can push the walls away from me. I can reach out and touch them from where I sit and yet they are so far from me."

"Consolation is about sharing loneliness and making it bearable."

"Once again Chile reduces us to what R. L. Stevenson called 'the virginity of senses' where words cannot match the impressions received."

"We both instinctively knew never to share weakness until you understood it. ‘Share only strength’ was an unspoken motto between us."

"Politics can only be a small part of what we are. It’s a way of seeing, it’s not all-seeing in itself, and people like me, who were fortunate enough to be born and educated before the start of the tragedy that has engulfed the North of Ireland, found the panacea of politics to be a bitter cul-de-sac."

"Men of Erin! awake, and make haste to be blest! Rise! arch of the ocean, and queen of the West!"

"Hapless nation, hapless land, Heap of uncementing sand! Crumbled by a foreign weight, Or by worse, domestic hate!"

"When Erin first rose from the dark-swelling flood, God blessed the green island, he saw it was good. The Emerald of Europe, it sparkled and shone In the ring of this world, the most precious stone."

"Arm of Erin, prove strong, but be gentle as brave, And, uplifted to strike, still be ready to save; Nor one feeling of vengeance presume to defile The cause or the men of the Emerald Isle."

"Pure, just, benign; thus filial love would trace The virtues hallowing this narrow space; The Emerald Isle may grant a wider claim, And link the Patriot with his country's name."

"We would be strangers in the Capitol; this is our country also, no-where else; and we shall not be outcast on the world."

"I'm an Ulsterman, of planter stock. I was born in the island of Ireland, so secondarily I'm an Irishman. I was born in the British archipelago and English is my native tongue, so I am British. The British archipelago consists of offshore islands to the continent of Europe, so I'm European. This is my hierarchy of values and so far as I am concerned, anyone who omits one step in that sequence of values is falsifying the situation."

"It will all come right, if you try. The beginning is not everything."

"If your faith is the foundation of all that you do, it actually enchances everything else and gives you a greater joy to experience everything else because everything is ordered properly."

"Indeed a Golden Jubilee is a day for looking to the past. But it is above all an occasion for renewing our commitment in the future, our commitment to facing up to the realities of joy and sorrow in our lives."

"The future belongs to those who can generate hope from the past rather than despair."

"The public education system has to be focused on doing the best for the largest number of people. It can end up ceasing to be primarily a test of academic ability and more become a measure of those who are financially able. I hope our politicians could grapple with that reality - when business enters education we have to ask questions."

"After a long period when politicians weren't even sitting in the same building together, there actually was the churches working together, who in many ways provided the fabric that held society together."

"We have now reached the final stage of our study. We have seen that the economic life of India at the end of the sixteenth century was characterised essentially by inadequate production and faulty distribution, and it remains only to take account of the tendencies at work ; did the situation existing at the death of Akbar hold out a promise or a threat for the future prosperity of the coimtry ? The answer to this question must be that the whole tendency of the economic environment was still further to discourage production, and to enhance the existing faults of distribution, so that a period of increasing impoverishment was to be expected, but that other and less conspicuous forces were just beginning to operate which offered a more hopeful prospect for the distant future."

"It became a fashion to raid a village or group of villages without any obvious justification, and carry off the inhabitants as slaves."

"This forced Akbar to reissue the ban on enslavement in 1576. In his reign, witnessed della Valle, ‘servant and slaves were so numerous and cheap that ‘everybody, even of mean fortune, keeps a great family, and is splendidly attended.’’"

"It is not easy to make a simple appeal to the Andronovo culture to resolve all the issues of Indo-Iranian origins... When the archaeological evidence becomes so opaque then our only refuge... is probability and a little intuition."

"Will the 'real' linguist please stand up? It should be obvious that linguists have as much difficulty in establishing the chronological relationships between loanwords as any other 'historical science'" (98)."

"In his earlier works, Mallory himself, acknowledged that theories pertaining to an Asian homeland had long fallen out of repute, "but one wonders if this is not just partly due to the ridicule heaped upon them by their opponents rather than reasoned dismissal" ... "all too often has one discredited line of argument been used to ridicule another theory which came to the same conclusion" (Mallory 1975, 56)."

"Mallory ended his overview of the “IE problem” (1973: 60) with this perceptive statement: “a solution to the problem will more than likely be as dependent on a re-examination of the methodology and terminology involved as much as on the actual data themselves.”"

"For the present it will be better to hold all of these mutually conflicting theories in the backs of our minds and preclude no solution to the homeland problem."

""as the IE homeland problem involves a spatial definition of a prehistoric linguistic construct, the utility of any other discipline, such as archaeology, depends on whether a linguistic entity can be translated into something discernable in the archaeological record. In short, any solution not purely linguistic must involve some form of indirect inference whose own premises are usually, if not invariably, far from demonstrated" (Mallory 1997, 94)."

"Our dating of the Indo-Aryan element in the Mitanni texts is based purely and simply on written documents offering datable contexts. While we cannot with certainty push these dates prior to the fifteenth century BC. It should not be forgotten that the Indic elements seem to be little more than the residue of a dead language in Hurrian, and that the symbiosis that produced the Mitanni may have taken place centuries earlier."

"The westward expansion of the Kurgan culture has been mapped with some degree of accuracy: “If an archaeologist is set the problem of examining the archaeological record for a cultural horizon that is both suitably early and of reasonable uniformity to postulate as the common prehistoric ancestor of the later Celtic, Germanic, Baltic, Slavic, and possibly some of the Indo-European languages of Italy, then the history of research indicates that the candidate will normally be the Corded Ware culture. At about 3200-2300 BC this Corded Ware horizon is sufficiently early to predate the emergence of any of the specific proto-languages. In addition, it is universally accepted as the common component if not the very basis of the later Bronze Age cultures that are specifically identified with the different proto-languages. Furthermore, its geographical distribution from Holland and Switzerland on the west across northern and central Europe to the upper Volga and middle Dniepr encompasses all those areas which [have been] assigned as the “homelands” of these European proto-languages.”"

"Although [the domestic horse] has occasionally been recovered from Harappan sites, for example Surkotada and Kalibangan, no one would credit the earlier Harappan culture as exemplifying the horse-centred culture of the Vedic Aryans."

"One linguist’s Indo-European names become another’s proto-Basque, or Caucasian or anything else."

"‘The temptation to read every cline on a map of genetic features as a migration and tie it to a putative linguistic movement has led to ostensibly circular reasoning. … [T]here is an assumed correlation between language and human physical type. … [But] there is no requirement whatsoever that the trail of language shift should also leave a clearly defined genetic trail as well. Nor for that matter can we assume that if we do find a genetic trail, this necessarily resulted in a language shift favourable for those carrying the gene rather than their absorption by local populations’"

"If there are any lessons to be learned, it is that every model of Indo-European origins can be found to reveal serious deficiencies as we increase our scrutiny."

"The problem here, of course, is that over time we have come to know more and more and that our earlier, simpler and more alluring narratives of Indo-European origins and dispersals are all falling victim to our increasing knowledge. We have obviously moved on from the time when Nikolai Merpert first published his analyses of the role of the steppelands within the context of the Indo-European homeland but it is evident that we still have a very long way to go."

"In any event, all three models [Anatolian Neolithic, Near Eastern, Pontic-Caspian] require some form of major language shift despite there being no credible archaeological evidence to demonstrate, through elite dominance or any other mechanism, the type of language shift required to explain, for example, the arrival and dominance of the Indo-Aryans in India."

"Mallory (1997) agrees that there is solid evidence in both European and Asiatic stocks for Proto-Indo-European cereals, as well as the agricultural terminology required to process them. He notes that "while the economic emphasis of the immediate ancestors of the Indo-Iranians may have been towards pastoralism there is good evidence that they too are derived from a mixed agricultural population" (236-237)"

"Mallory (1998) offers a Kulturkugel (culture bullet) as a possible explanatory model for the Indo-Aryan incursions, although remarking that "German is employed here to enhance the respectability of an already shaky model" (192). This conceptual pro- jectile is envisioned as an Indo-Iranian linguistic bullet propelled by the social organization of the steppes outlined previously and tipped with a nose of malleable Andronovo material culture. After impacting the BMAC culture, the projectile continues on its trajectory, but now as an Indo-Aryan linguistic bullet with a BMAC cultural tip. In other words, the steppe tribes entered the BMAC, shed the trappings of their Andronovo heritage, and then, reacculturated, continued on their way toward India after having adopted the cultural baggage of the BMAC and undergone the linguistic transformations separating the language of the Indo-Iranians from that of the Indo- Aryans. Mallory is too good of a scholar not to immediately include an addendum, stating that "the introduction of the kulturkugel emphasizes the tendentious nature of any arguments for the dispersals of the Indo-Iranians into their historic seats south of Central Asia" (193). He is also candid enough to point out that "it is ... difficult to imagine how such a concept could be verified in the archaeological record or, to continue the metaphor, could be traced back to the original 'smoking gun'" (194). Mallory's Kulturkugel is the type of gymnastics incumbent on anyone attempting to find archaeological evidence of the Indo-Aryans all the way across Asia and into the subcontinent."

"Nonetheless, those who do find die aforementioned linguistic exigencies compelling must find some way of getting the Indo-Aryans speakers into the subcontinent by some means or another. Mallory (1998) feels comfortable enough ascribing some form of Indo-Iranian identity to the Andronovo culture but admits that, "on the other hand, we find it extraordinarily difficult to make a case for expansions from this northern region to northern India . . . where we would presume Indo-Aryans had settled by the mid-second millennium BCE" (191). Referring to the attempts at connecting the Indo-Aryans to such sites as the Bishkent and Vakhsh cultures, he remarks that "this type of explanation only gets the Indo-Iranian to Central Asia, but not as far as the seats of the Medes, Persians or Indo-Aryans" (192). He points out that suggesting an Indo-Aryan identity for the BMAC requires a presumption that this culture was dominated by steppe tribes. However, "while there is no doubt that there was a steppe presence on BMAC sites, . . . this is very far from demonstrating the adoption of an Indo-Iranian language by the Central Asia urban population" (192)."

"While a good case can be made for an expansion of Pontic-Caspian pastoralists onto the Asiatic steppe, and perhaps also into the belt of central Asian urban centres (Parpola 1988), it is still difficult to demonstrate movements from the steppe into the historical seats of the Indo-Aryans and the Iranians of Iran itself."

"Elsewhere, Mallory (1997) complains that the "argument of archaeological continuity could probably be supported for every IE-speaking region of Eurasia where any archaeologist can effortlessly pen such statements as 'while there may be some evidence for the diffusion of ideas, there is no evidence for the diffusion of population movement'" (104)."