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“After all the world is indeed beautiful and if we were any other creature than man we might be continuously happy in it.”
“There is seldom a difficulty with religion where there is friendship.”
“It is very stupifying to be Irish and have none of the traits or the memories or even a recognisable bloody accent. No one on this earth has ever confused me for an Irishman, and yet that is what I am, as far as I know.” [46]
“I knew immediately something was terribly wrong, but you can know that and not allow the thought in your head, at the front of your head. It dances around at the back, where it can’t be controlled. But the front of the head is where the pain begins.”
“Because it strikes me there is something greater than judgement. I think it is called mercy.”
“And whatever my life had been up to that day, it was another life after that. And that is the gospel truth.”
“Clinton and his cigar was so much greater a man than Bush and his rifle.”
“That is because at the close of the day the ship we sail in is the soul, not the body.” [177]
“The world begins anew with every birth, my father used to say. He forgot to say, with every death it ends. Or did not think he needed to. Because for a goodly part of his life he worked in a graveyard.”
“That place where I was born was a cold town. Even the mountains stood away. They were not sure, no more than me, of that dark spot, those same mountains.
There was a black river that flowed through the town, and if it had no grace for mortal beings, it did for swans, and many swans resorted there, and even rode the river like some kind of plunging animal, in floods.”
“For I did not want him to see, or to question me, for here contains already secrets, and my secrets are my fortune and my sanity.”
“I rose and moved towards him. You would have done the same yourself. It is an ancient matter. Something propels you towards sudden grief, or perhaps also sometimes repels. You move away. I moved towards it, I couldn’t help it.”
“It is always worth itemising happiness, there is so much of the other thing in a life, you had better put down the markers for happiness while you can.”
“As I do not seem able much to heal, then maybe I can simply be a responsible witness to the miracle of the ordinary soul.”
“It is very difficult to be a hero without an audience, although, in a sense, we are each the hero of a peculiar, half-ruined film called our life.”
“My own story, anyone’s own story, is always told against me, even what I myself am writing here, because I have no heroic history to offer. There is no difficulty not of my own making.”
“Now yet again I discover I do not have the language, the lingo, to talk to her about this, or about anything. We have neglected the tiny sentences of life and now the big ones are beyond our reach.”
“A beard on a man is only a way of hiding something, his face of course, but also the inner matters, like a hedge around a secret garden, or a cover over a bird cage.”
“The world is not full of betrayers, it is full of people with decent motives and a full desire to do right by those who know them and love them. This is a little-known truth, but I think it is a truth nonetheless. Empirically, from all the years of my work, I would attest to that. I know it is a miraculous conclusion, but there it is. We like to make strangers of everyone. We are not wolves, but lambs astonished in the margins of the fields by sunlight and summer.” [Dr Grene; 178]
“I am old enough to know that time passing is just a trick, a convenience. Everything is always there, still unfolding, still happening. The past, the present, and the future, in the noggin eternally, like brushes, combs and ribbons in a handbag.”
“It is not history. But I am beginning to wonder strongly what is the nature of history. Is it only memory in decent sentences, and if so, how reliable is it? I would suggest, not very. And that therefore most truth and fact offered by these syntactical means is treacherous and unreliable. And yet I recognise that we live our lives, and even keep our sanity, by the lights of this treachery and this unreliability, just as we build our love of country on these paper worlds of misapprehension and untruth. Perhaps this is our nature, and perhaps unaccountably it is part of our glory as a creature, that we can build our best and most permanent buildings on foundations of utter dust.” (293)
“Because faithfulness is not a human question, but a divine one.”
“I did not know that a person could hold up a wall made up of imaginary bricks and mortar against the horrors and cruel, dark tricks of time that assail us, and be the author therefore of themselves.”
“Her greatest wish I should think was that I would remain exactly as I was, and how I regret that that was not to be. It was only for her roses that she wished for change, the strange moment of floral enchantment when the branch of a rose mutates, and shows a ‘sport,’ something new arising from the known rose. A leap in beauty.”
“And he is about seventy, very dignifed, unwell, and mad. Yes, he is mad. That is to say, psychotic, and I see from his file that he unfortunately was found years ago sheltering in a schoolyard, under a seat, with three dead dogs tied to his leg, which he was dragging about with him. But as I spoke to him, all I could feel was love. That was ridiculous. And I am deeply, deeply suspicious of it.”
“Whose sleeve do I have to grip, to tell my story to? It used to be Bet. Now, sleeveless. And I am sure I gripped her sleeve many a time too many. In my own parlance, ’feasting’ on her energy, and giving nothing back. Well, maybe. We had most excellent days. We were the king and queen of coffee in the morning, in the dark of winter, in the early morning sun of summer that came right in our windows, right in, to wake us. Ah, yes, small matters. Small matters, that we call sanity, or the cloth that makes sanity. Talking to her in those times made - no, God preserve me from sentimentality. Those days are over. Now we are two foreign countries and we simply have our embassies in the same house. Relations are friendly but strictly diplomatic. There is an underlying sense of rumour, of judgement, of memory, like two peoples that have once committed grave crimes against each other, but in another generation. We are a statelet of the Baltics. Except, blast her, she has never done anything to me. It is atrocity all one way.” (49)
“History needs to be mightily inventive about human life because bare life is an accusation against man’s dominion of the earth.” (55)
“It is funny, but it strikes me that a person without anecdotes that they nurse while they live, and that survive them, are more likely to be utterly lost not only to history but the family following them. Of course this is the fate of most souls, reducing entire lives, no matter how vivid and wonderful, to those sad black names on withering family trees, with half a date dangling after and a question mark.” (47)
“Well, all speaking is difficult, whether peril attends it or not. Sometimes peril to the body, sometimes a more intimate, miniature, invisible peril to the soul. When to speak at all is a betrayal of something, perhaps a something not even identified, hiding inside the chambers of the body like a scared refugee in a site of war.”
‘How I wished suddenly for my own mother to seek for me so fiercely, so sweatingly, to find me again on the lost strand of the world, to rescue me, to recruit others for my rescue, to bring me again to her breat, as that distant mother so obviously ached to do with the happy creature in her arms.’ [131]
“It is along the strands of the world that the privilege of possessing children is most blatantly seen. What torment for the spinster and the childless man, to see the various sizes of little demons and angels ranged along the tide line. Like some species of migratory animal. The human animal began as a mere wriggling thing in the ancient seas, struggling out onto land with many regrets. That is what brings us so full of longing to the sea.”[137]
“If it had been a great necessity, if it had been contingents of an army meeting to overwhelm the enemy by stealth, it might not have worked out so neatly. But fate it would seem is a perfect strategist and will work miracles of timing to assist our destruction.”
“The world is not full of betrayers, it is full of people with decent motives and a full desire to do right by those who know them and love them. This is a little-known truth, but I think it is a truth nonetheless. Empirically, from all the years of my work, I would attest to that. I know it is a miraculous conclusion, but there it is. We like to make strangers of everyone. We are not wolves, but lambs astonished in the margins of the fields by sunlight and summer.” [186]
“Memory, I must suppose, if it is neglected becomes like a box room, or a lumber room in an old house, the contents jumbled about, maybe not only from neglect but also from too much haphazard searching in them, and things to boot thrown in that don’t belong there.” [208-09]
“There are some sufferings that we seem as a creature to forget, or we would never survive as a creature among all the other creatures.”
“I was well aware how famously or infamously secretive these old institutions can be, no more than ourselves, a mixture of worry, lost power, perhaps even concern. That the truth may not always be desirable, that one thing leads to another thing, that facts not only lead forward to resolution, but backwards into the shadows, and sometimes into the various little hells we make for each other.”
“I suppose therefore God is the connoisseur of filthied hearts and souls, and can see the old, the first pattern in them, and cherish them for that.”
“Roseanne, Roseanne, if I called to you now, my own self calling to my own self, would you hear me? And if you could hear me, would you heed me?”
“It is always worth itemizing happiness, there is so much of the other thing in a life, you had better put down the markers of happiness while you can.”
What can I tell you further? I once lived among humankind, and found them in their generality to be cruel and cold, and yet could mention the names of three or four that were like angels. / I suppose we measure the importance of our days by those few angels we spy among us, and yet aren’t like them. If our suffering is great on account of that, yet at close of day the gift of life is something immense. Something larger than old Sligo mountains, something difficult but oddly bright, that makes equal in their fall the hammers and the feathers.[268]
[See quotations from The Secret Scripture related to Sir Thomas Browne's Religio Medici, see separate file - as attached.] |