novelists-from-northern-ireland

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"Meningitis. It was a word you had to bite on to say it. It had a fright and a hiss in it."

"I know that what your city has done in the war that is past, it shall do again in the war that has already arrived and has still to be won in the future. It is an onerous responsibility. Yet it is a matter of personal pride and happiness that this responsibility is to be borne by the people of the city I first came to know during the war at the Combined Naval and Air Headquarters at Magee College and that I have visited regularly ever since. It is here, where fashion and fads are treated with amusement and contempt, here, in a society that is rooted in tradition and continuity, that one can have a sense of the links between the human struggle and the eternal verities. Without that abiding sense of continuity, men would become little better than the flies of a summer. With that as a treasured element of our patrimony, we become actors in a great drama, a story that ends in a world beyond our own and for which our own is an immense and glorious preparation. God is the goal of our history; our history is the preserve of the God-fearing, the brave, the chivalric, the courteous, the humble."