Someone Quotes
"All human eyes are beautiful, but Pegeen’s were very black and heavily lashed and gorgeous now, with the sparkle of her joke, or her plan, or, perhaps, her vision of some impossible future."
"But there’s always someone nice," she said, her voice suddenly gone singsong. "Someone always helps me up."
"I was a shy child, and comical-looking, with a round flat face and black slits for eyes, thick glasses, black bangs, a straight and serious mouth—a little girl cartoon."
"With my heart pinned to my father’s sleeve in those days."
"Slipping out of that first darkness, into the dusty, city light of these rooms, I met the blurred faces of the parents I’d been given—given through no merit of my own—faces that even to my defective eyes, ill-formed, you might say, in the hours of that first darkness, were astonished by love."
"‘Are not two sparrows sold for a small coin?’ he read. ‘Yet not one of them falls to the ground without your Father’s knowledge. Even all the hairs of your head are counted. So do not be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows.’"
"There, she said. There now. After all your fussing. You just have to get used to it."
"Pegeen had always been a clumsy girl, they said, although Fagin, the undertaker, suspected something more than the fall had killed her: Some burden in the brain, he had said."
"You’ll smother me," Mrs. Hanson was saying, and we caught even her dry teeth with our lips. "You’ll have to call Fagin," she cried, as if with her last breath. "I’ll be killed with affection."
"Never good to forget to remember," she said. "Always better to remember you forgot."
"I thought at first that she was trying to see me more clearly in the gloom, but then I realized that she was leaning in order to push her apron aside as she reached for the pocket underneath, in her skirt."
"A good outcome’s enough to say. Light a candle and ask our Blessed Lady for a good outcome. It only takes the asking."
"She’s hiding." We paused silently, as if waiting for some affirmation of this—a hand to a stirred curtain, a shadow behind the glass.
"Don’t be dense, Marie," my mother said. "Don’t stand there gawking at me like I’m speaking Chinese. Go."
"It was, I knew, paler than it should have been, but I turned off the oven anyway, simply to dispatch the task."
"Once you learn to do it, you’ll be expected to do it."
"A kitchen can be a dangerous place if you don’t pay attention."
"I felt no threat from this news, blithe child that I was."
"Walter Hartnett on the candy-store stool looked over my head every time a figure appeared in the cornered doorway behind me."
"Out on the sidewalk again, we walked without touching."
"All the thought and all the worry, all the faith and the philosophy, the paintings and the stories and the poems, all the whatnot, gone into the study of heaven or hell, and yet so little wonder applied to the sinking into sleep."
"My father would not return to earth, my eyes would not heal, I would never step out of my skin or marry Walter Hartnett in the pretty church."
"I sat on the edge of the bed. I wanted to take my glasses off, fling them across the room."
"Who’s going to love me? Someone. Someone will."
"The real truth of the matter, biology be damned, was all on the nun’s side."
"A mother’s love was a beautiful, light, relentless thing that the devil could not diminish."
"For every kindness my children bestowed... I found myself imagining how I might manage if they weren’t there, couldn’t come, were otherwise engaged."
"Sometimes you don’t see it at all," getting the last word.
"Would it be impolite of me to ask what happened?" he said. "Why he left? He seemed like a good priest. He always gave a good sermon."
"Once a priest, always a priest," he said, with more wisdom than I was willing to allow him.
"Not that I knew them," he said from behind me. "My Irish parents. I’m a foundling-home kid, truth be told."
"If you ask," he said softly, "you know I will do it for you. You only have to ask."
"We’re all of equal value in the eyes of God."
"But that don’t mean some of us won’t leave this world without anyone much taking notice."
"A little pain now," he said, "for a good outcome later. For your baby."
"He thinks women need to be more stoic about these things."
"A body, after all, was a paltry thing, and really, Momma, all modesty had long ago gone out the window."
"Later, he put his dry lips to my cheek and held them there."
"I felt a peculiar regret, the end of some intimacy."
"Love was required of me now—to be given, not merely to be sought and returned."
"My presence on earth was never more urgently needed."
"Now I knew what it was to abandon modesty, body, the entreaties of those who loved you, who wanted you to live."
"It was not that my life was less valuable to me now that I had glimpsed what it would be like to lose it."
"I was a bold piece. I had stood at death’s door. I had withstood pain."
"How was he to go back to his parish and stand in the pulpit and tell the people looking up at him that there was any mercy in this world?"
"Now I had my own mystery, mine alone, my singular experience never to be shared or even sufficiently described."
"Every single time I pull into the carport, they hit the window and I jump about a mile."
"A good old movie on TV can make my whole day."
"Will we ever know," I asked him now, "Gabe’s trouble?"
"We only know what the doctors tell us," Tom said. "Depression."
"Which pretty much tells us nothing," he added.
"'Grant me chastity and self-control,'" he said, quoting the saint, "'but please, God, not yet.'"
"How come you’re not still a priest? You didn’t like it?"
"It was the greatest privilege of my life, to be ordained."
"Do you remember Darcy Furlong?" he said into the darkness, just above the whirring of the fan. "From the brewery?"
"Who can know the heart of a man?" he whispered, and pulled the thin sheet up, over my shoulders and his, as was his habit before we went to sleep.
"Tommy’s drowned," he said. I could barely make out the words.
"This is a nice room, isn’t it?" I said. "It’s always been a great place for guests."
"I might have saved my brother’s life that night. I don’t know."
"It was the very cruelty of it that made me know it was real."
"Still, it was a terrible thing to say 'the body.'"
"Still, I had asked and it had been given. His life restored."