The Secret Scripture Quotes
"The world begins anew with every birth, my father used to say. He forgot to say, with every death it ends."
"That place where I was born was a cold town. Even the mountains stood away."
"The terror and hurt in my story happened because when I was young I thought others were the authors of my fortune or misfortune; I did not know that a person could hold up a wall made of imaginary bricks and mortar against the horrors and cruel, dark tricks of time that assail us, and be the author therefore of themselves."
"I am only a thing left over, a remnant woman, and I do not even look like a human being no more, but a scraggy stretch of skin and bone in a bleak skirt and blouse."
"I write out my life on unwanted paper – surplus to requirements. I start with a clean sheet – with many clean sheets."
"But small and narrow are all human things maybe."
"The greatest joy of my young life was issuing forth with my mother into the streets of Sligo at dusk."
"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."
"The principal room in our little house, while already of narrow dimensions, we shared with two large objects, viz. the aforementioned motorbike which had to be kept out of the rain."
"There are moments when I am pierced through by an inexplicable joy, as if, in having nothing, I have the world."
"Such a small, clean man when crossed was like a scything blade."
"The truth was, my father loved his country, he loved whatever in his mind he thought Ireland to be."
"Because his father was one of those radical thinkers, who had written pamphlets or at least preached sermons – because no pamphlets survive, but I seem to remember my father mentioning one or two – on the history of Protestantism in Ireland, my father held opinions not always favourable to himself."
"I had often gazed at that tray where it lived on the top of the dresser in the pantry, and imagined I could see a wind blowing along the flowers, and wondered what it was like in that world of heat and dark language."
"I was in two minds. First, alarmed that she had done so, and secondly, perfectly aware that I only knew because I had violated her privacy – a further violation of herself, as I knew she would see it."
"We have neglected the tiny sentences of life and now the big ones are beyond our reach."
"I cannot shed myself of the feeling of being the perpetual invader."
"He had been working a few nights already in the Protestant orphanage, a strange place in its own right, rats or no rats."
"They've a bed each these times, Roseanne, yes."
"My father was dousing the rats with paraffin, preparatory to throwing them on the fire one by one."
"At any rate he was opening the traps, grabbing the rats one by one."
"Now we heard the glass of windows break somewhere, and suddenly a long thin arm of bright yellow flame came streaking out."
"The girls, most of them my own age in that particular chamber, started to climb out through the windows onto the wide ledge, every one with their pinnies already burning, screaming and screaming."
"One hundred and twenty-three girls had been killed, from the burning and the falling."
"Well, all speaking is difficult, whether peril attends it or not."
"The art of not seeing a salmon is very dark too, you must stare and stare at the known sections where salmon are sometimes got, and imagine them down there, feel them there, sense them with some seventh sense."
"What torment for the spinster and the childless man, to see the various sizes of little demons and angels ranged along the tide line."
"The human animal began as a mere wriggling thing in the ancient seas, struggling out onto land with many regrets."
"It is along the strands of the world that the privilege of possessing children is most blatantly seen."
"The sea there made only the slightest effort at going in and out, it always seemed to me."
"There were all sorts at the dance, toffs from the town, and lads with trousers too short for them, showing their socks, or bare legs stuck into battered shoes."
"It was lovely to snuggle up to a lad at the end of a dance, you sweaty and him all sweaty too, in the summer, the smell of soap and turf off him."
"Every nuance of her, every turn of the head, every moment of tenderness between us, every gift, every surprise, every joke, every outing, holidays in Bundoran and later Benidorm, every kind word, helpful sentence, it all gathered together like a sea, the sea of Bet, and rose up from the depths of our history, the seabed of all we were, in a great wave, and crashed down on the greying shore of myself, engulfed me, and would that it had washed me away for good."
"I think it is a Protestant name and maybe comes out of England long ago."
"How does good history become bad history by and by?"
"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."
"The great pull of the current beginning to take me, like a word lost in a swell of music."
"I knew my luck, knew it as well as a sparrow when it finds a speck of bread all to itself."
"We'd go up the concrete steps to the pictures between those laurel hedges. We might have been a couple in Hollywood, I might have been Mary Pickford herself, though I suppose in all honesty Tom was too small to be Douglas Fairbanks."
"It's that banging that has me done in. Such a little thing. But it has thrown my nerves into a sort of hyper-awareness."
"Men are not really humans at all, no, I mean, they have different priorities."
"Chocolate you can get enough of. But some things."
"Why does the salmon go home to the Garravoge, when it has all the sea to roam over?"
"We are not wolves, but lambs astonished in the margins of the fields by sunlight and summer."
"Because faithfulness is not a human question, but a divine one."
"I don't know what women's priorities are either, at least, I know what they are and never did feel them."
"The only good thing I can think of that came out of it was, it 'inspired' me to read psychiatry at Durham, almost as an act of retrospective and hopeless insurance against the thing happening."
"Roseanne is just a bit of paper blowing on the edge of the wasteland."
"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."
"It is no small thing to shoot a person, yet in those days it seemed to be considered a thing of small account."
"I screamed and screamed in the hut as if I was the only hurting dog in the whole world."
"The real comfort is that the history of the world contains so much grief that my small griefs are edged out, and are only cinders at the borders of the fire."
"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."
"I am mortally sick of the rational mind. What creature does that look like? The celestial pedant?"
"And civil war is an evil that befalls all souls equally."
"I had seen murder though, with my very eyes. And I had seen how murder could travel sideways and take other lives all unbeknownst."
"I am saying this again because I want it to be true."
"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."
"And like the impulse that drives the old maid to make a garden, with a meagre rose and a straggling daffodil, gives a hint of some coming paradise."
"All that remains of me now is a rumour of beauty."
"Truth to tell I am not so sanguine about all this myself, and feel very much hurried and harried."
"The boat is always in the middle of a storm and one tries not to rock it further."
"I read Roseanne's account of things like a scholar of her life, making a mental concordance of facts and events."
"The first feeling I had reading it was privilege."
"Morality has its own civil wars, with its own victims in their own time and place."
"What is wrong about her account if she sincerely believes it? Is not most history written in a sort of wayward sincerity?"
"I must never forget that in my moment of deepest travail she crossed the room and put her hand on my shoulder, an utterly simple gesture perhaps, but more graceful and helpful to me than the gift of a kingdom."
"I am profoundly grateful that I did not use Fr Gaunt's account to question her with, aggressively or subtly, whichever, and that I followed my own instincts."
"I was so moved I almost told her. But I still did not."
"The important thing seemed to me that the person who wrote and spoke was admirable, living, and complete."
"We are in mourning for our mothers before even we are born."