Burial Rites Quotes
"I cannot let myself slip away. I will hold what I am inside, and keep my hands tight around all the things I have seen and heard, and felt."
"They will say ‘Agnes’ and see the spider, the witch caught in the webbing of her own fateful weaving. They might see the lamb circled by ravens, bleating for a lost mother. But they will not see me. I will not be there."
"I have come to expect harm now. Some of the watchmen at Stóra-Borg compassed my body with small violences, chronicled their hatred towards me, a mark here, bruises, blossoming like star clusters under the skin, black and yellow smoke trapped under the membrane."
"It is already a fine day outside. The grass is wet from a night rain, and the blades look bright in the light of the rising sun."
"It was that first spring at Illugastadir. The light had arrived like a hunted thing, all wide-eyed and trembling. The sea was blank – Natan pushed the boat along its silvered skin, plunged his oars in its side."
"As you can see, there is a great amount of work that must be done about this place."
"I don’t want you in my home. I don’t want you near my children."
"You’ve had enough already? Try a year of them and their hard hands, hard looks."
"I wake every morning with a blow of grief to my heart."
"If I had known that the dress I laboured over would be my only warmth in a room that reeked of sour skin."
"I suppose because, I mean, we want, Blöndal and the clergy, and I . . . We want you to return to God."
"I may as well be talking to him with a stone in my mouth, trying to find a language that we both understand."
"The only things I know about my mother are what other people have told me."
"The blood tie is not strong: they have different fathers apiece."
"They pity you too," he added, wanting to comfort her.
"They don’t pity me; they hate me. All of them."
"A thinking woman cannot be trusted. Believe there’s no room for innocence."
"I have a question for you, speaking of truth. You say God speaks the truth?"
"I try to love God, Reverend. I do. But I cannot love these men."
"You mustn’t act like that again," he said in a low voice.
"Good thing, then, that there is no one left to love. No one left to bury."
"I can feel the others listening. I can feel Steina and Margrét and Kristín and Lauga stretching their ears towards us in the shadowy corner, eating up this story like fresh butter and bread."
"I am quite alone," Agnes said, almost matter-of-factly.
"I am sure that you will make a fine priest after all," she said.
"María asked if he wasn’t actually Ketilsson, and Natan replied that yes, indeed he was also Ketilsson, and that he had a great many more names besides, though not all of them were fit for our delicate ears."
"It is impossible to think of Natan as the stranger he was, once, to me."
"We’re all shipwrecked. All beached in a peat bog of poverty."
"Throughout a dull-eyed cycle of work, nights slept alone, waking to nothing but chores, those hidden bruises suggested something more."
"My soul thawed. A fire raged in the wake of his lips, while the wind shrieked outside."
"We each created towers, two beacons, the like of which are built along roads to guide the way when the weather comes down."
"What difference does it make anyway, my Jón? Both of them know what happened, and what they didn’t know before, Róslín has evidently poured into their ears since."
"Couldn’t he see how much I missed him? How different he was from any other man I had known?"
"Sometimes I’d go to the outhouse and hammer the dried cod heads with a cow thighbone. Just to beat and rail against something."
"He needed me like he needed air. I felt it in his gaze, in the way he grappled for my body like a buoy in the water."
"Do you understand what I am saying, Reverend? Or is love constant for you? Have you ever loved a woman? A person you love as much as you hate the hold they have on you?"
"I hated the way my mind would turn to Natan throughout the day, until I was sick with the pattern of my thoughts."
"‘I want something from you.’ Daníel’s tone changed then. His voice became softer. ‘Agnes, you must know that I am fond of you.’"
"‘Agnes,’ he said. ‘I’ve been dreaming about you.’"
"I waited until Natan climbed out of Sigga’s bed and turned into his own. I waited until Sigga’s breath grew calm and even, and Natan began to snore. I waited until I knew they were asleep before I sat up and gazed at the blankets before me."
"‘It’s hard to be alone in winter,’ Margrét agreed."
"‘The sea is different up around Vatnsnes. Sometimes the water in the fjord is like a looking glass. Something you want to run your tongue across. "As glazed as a dead man’s eye," as Natan used to say.’"