Quotes & Sayings About Belfast

I started to watch 'Play for Today' and plays like 'Cathy Come Home,' and Kenneth Branagh's 'Billy' trilogy in the 1980s, which took us into the world of the Belfast family. As a kid in Luton, how was I ever going to know that world otherwise? — Colin Salmon

The really big challenge is delivering the social justice agenda in the Belfast Agreement, which hasn't been delivered. — Mike Nesbitt

I got a letter from 13-year-old Ryan from Belfast. Now, Ryan, if you're out in the crowd tonight, here's the answer to your question. No, as far as I know, an alien spacecraft did not crash in Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947. And, Ryan, if the United States Air Force did recover alien bodies, they didn't tell me about it, either, and I want to know. — William J. Clinton

I really love it in Belfast. I always stay in the most bombed hotel, the Europa! — Gareth Gates

When I was growing up, Belfast City Hall was surrounded by security, and we had no access to it. But now, people come in and out of it all the time. On a nice day, office workers and students sit on the lawn outside and have lunch. It's great to see how Northern Ireland has changed. To be part of that is fantastic. — James Nesbitt

The thirties were troublesome in Belfast, and then of course there was no work for people, and it was terribly religiously divided. — Frank Carson

When I retired from the circus at the grand old age of 11, my parents thought it would be best to focus more on the challenges ahead, and so I started at Methodist College Belfast. — Ian Beattie

People fell in love with Alex Higgins, a working-class fellow from the back streets of Belfast. That's what brought the game alive. — John Higgins

He came to the States in 1963, I think with a view to making up with my mother, but that didn't work. He came for three weeks, and drank his way all over Brooklyn. And went back ... I went to his funeral in Belfast. — Frank McCourt

I've never read anything set in Belfast that doesn't involve the Troubles or something senseless over a flag. — Jamie Dornan

I suspect that the only thing that will take Articles Two and Three out of the Irish Constitution is when the bombs begin to blow in Dublin in the way that they have been in Belfast and in London. — Norman Tebbit

We'll be launching the new public prosecution service in Northern Ireland tomorrow. I'll be doing it in Belfast tomorrow. This is an entirely new era, in which criminal justice now exercised on an equal basis, not the old basis in which community division was a feature. — Peter Hain

The riot had taken on a beauty of its own now. Arcs of gasoline fire under the crescent moon. Crimson tracer in mystical parabolas. Phosphorescence from the barrels of plastic bullet guns. A distant yelling like that of men below decks in a torpedoed prison ship. The scarlet whoosh of Molotovs intersecting with exacting surfaces. Helicopters everywhere: their spotlights finding one another like lovers in the Afterlife.
And all this through a lens of oleaginous Belfast rain. — Adrian McKinty

Belfast during the Troubles looked like a different world. — Clive Owen

I think the poetry that came out of Belfast, and especially the Queen's University set, in the 1970s and '80s - you know, Paul Muldoon and Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon and Ciaran Carson - that was probably the finest body of work since the Gaelic renaissance, up there with the work of Yeats and Synge and Lady Gregory. — Adrian McKinty

All you would hear every night on the news was that somebody had been shot dead in a certain part of Belfast. We lived opposite a judge, and there were always soldiers crouched down in our garden. We'd sit and talk to them, and I even used to sing to them! — Rachel Tucker

I started singing in pubs and clubs around Belfast when I was 10. My dad is a musician, and he took me 'round; I impersonated Tina Turner and Shirley Bassey, and the crowd couldn't believe what was coming out of this little girl. — Rachel Tucker

Thanks to my father who, as it was to turn out, had already taught me most of what I needed to know about business in his butcher's shop in Belfast. Thanks to my mother, who taught me that there are many things in life much more important than business. — Russell Napier

When I started studying tenor saxophone as a kid in Belfast, I did so with a guy named George Cassidy, who was also a big inspiration. — Van Morrison

Blind faith can justify anything.* If a man believes in a different god, or even if he uses a different ritual for worshipping the same god, blind faith can decree that he should die - on the cross, at the stake, skewered on a Crusader's sword, shot in a Beirut street, or blown up in a bar in Belfast. Memes for blind faith have their own ruthless ways of propagating themselves. This is true of patriotic and political as well as religious blind faith. — Richard Dawkins

Star"

Tony went to fight in Belfast
Rudi stayed at home to starve
I could make it all worthwhile
as a rock & roll star
Bevan tried to change the nation
Sonny wants to turn the world, well he can tell you that
he tried
I could make a transformation as a rock & roll star

[CHORUS (x2)]
So inviting - so enticing to play the part
I could play the wild mutation
as a rock & roll star
I could do with the money
I'm so wiped out with things as they are
I'd send my photograph to my honey - and I'd c'mon like
a regular superstar

I could fall asleep at night
as a rock & roll star
I could fall in love all right
as a rock & roll star — David Bowie

After the allied victory of 1918, at the end of my father's war, the victors divided up the lands of their former enemies. In the space of just seventeen months, they created the borders of Northern Ireland, Yugoslavia and most of the Middle East. And I have spent my entire career - in Belfast and Sarajevo, in Beirut and Baghdad - watching the people within those borders burn. — Robert Fisk

My dad moved to London in his early 20s and didn't really go back. So the irony is I've spent lots and lots of time in Ireland, but not with my dad. I've shot films in Belfast, where he's from. And I've shot in Dun Laoghaire. Which is great. And I've shot in Dublin. — Imogen Poots

I'm just a normal working class boy from Belfast. — Kenneth Branagh

Like the Hindu in Belfast who was asked whether he was a Catholic Hindu or a Protestant Hindu, those of us who follow this fresh reading of the New Testament want to say to our critics right and left, 'Don't imagine that because we don't check all your fundamentalist boxes, we must be modernists, or that because we don't check all your modernist boxes, we must be fundamentalists. — N. T. Wright

There are some discussions taking place in the United Arab Emirates about the prospects of a long-haul flight into Belfast. — Martin McGuinness

I certainly notice the vitality in Belfast, which wasn't there in the Seventies. There was a war going on then. Now there are cranes everywhere. There really is a sense of renewal and hope. — Liam Neeson

I went back to Belfast and started a club, the Maritime. No one had thought about doing a blues club, so I was the first. — Van Morrison

Hoodwink is a product of his environment. He grew up in Belfast, he was part of the UDA and he fought for what he believed in - or was brainwashed into believing - because of the people that surrounded him. — Andy Serkis

I grew up in leafy suburbs in north and east Belfast, but if I had been born a mile down the road closer to the city centre, you might never heard of me. — Mike Nesbitt

This was how it had to be. The city centre had to be for all religions, and so the ubiquitous, shinning, grey had quickly become the nascent colour. Whereas the the Ardoyne rejoced in the tricolours and every shade of green, so too the Shankill kept their houses and kerbs in the Union Jack, and each side of the divided city painted their gables and drenched themselves in the rich colours which formed their history, their protection, their identity, their, and they lived under the terrible weight that came with it. In Belfast, colour was joyful, territorial, and frightening. And so the heart of the city embraced a comforting blanket of grey. — Steve Cavanagh

If I had stayed in Belfast, my life there wouldn't have as easy as it was in Scotland. I see the strain on the people who stayed. Always worrying about the safety of their children. — Joan Lingard

On my Wikipedia page, it used to say I was born in Belfast, Ireland, then it said Belfast, Northern Ireland, and then it said Belfast, U.K. So there was a little war going on about where Belfast is located. — Adrian McKinty

THERE IS an old saying that in Belfast it rains five days out — Jack Higgins

There is an old Belfast joke about the man stopped at a roadblock and asked his religion. When he replies that he is an atheist he is asked, Protestant or Catholic atheist? — Christopher Hitchens

My parents were Belfast Catholics. — Pete Hamill

I remember vividly as a 15-year-old, in 1964, seeing Derry play Glentoran in the Irish Cup Final at Windsor Park in Belfast. Glentoran were one of the two big Belfast teams, along with Linfield. Any rural team playing them was up against the odds. — Martin McGuinness

If you really have to get shot, Belfast is one of the best places to do it. After twenty years of the Troubles, and after thousands of assassination attempts and punishment shootings, Belfast has trained many of the best gunshot-trauma surgeons in the world. — Adrian McKinty

When I play discos in Belfast or freshers' week in Oxford, there are 1,800 kids dressed as me. It's odd, it's funny, and it pays really well. — David Hasselhoff

Is it true or false that Belfast is north of London? That the galaxy is the shape of a fried egg? That Beethoven was a drunkard? That Wellington won the battle of Waterloo? There are various degrees and dimensions of success in making statements: the statements fit the facts always more or less loosely, in different ways on different occasions for different intents and purposes. — J.L. Austin

I remembered when I'd told my family I was moving to Belfast, their reactions were the same. "IRELAND?" I'd laughed. "Uh, no. Belfast, Maine. It's a twelve month position. — N.R. Walker

Niall Lynch was a braggart poet, a loser musician, a charming bit of hard luck bred in Belfast but born in Cumbria, and Ronan loved him like he loved nothing else. — Maggie Stiefvater

I might bump into them because I live in Belfast, and Belfast is not that big a place. You go for a walk, and you walk past Kit Harington. You go for a meal, and there's Peter Dinklage. — Ian Beattie

Listen, I'm from Belfast. We're not polite people. And it's language. We're direct. — Paula Malcomson

I went to Queen's University Belfast and stayed nine months, then I ran away to be an actor. — Simon Callow

I think that we live in a remarkably networked world. The problem with that, of course, is that tensions can travel in nanoseconds across the Internet, and so the tensions between Shiites and Sunnis in Baghdad, or between Protestants and Catholics in Belfast - those show up in different parts of the world. — Eboo Patel

When we went to Belfast we saw some beautiful countryside and coastlines. — Sarah Sutton

Belfast is a city which, while not forgetting its past, is living comfortably with its present and looking forward to its future. — James Nesbitt

The countryside in Belfast is beautiful. No technical wizardry is needed to show quite how glorious it is in its natural state. — Gwendoline Christie