The Good People Quotes
"For one long moment she stared at the men bearing Martin’s weight on their sweating shoulders, standing in the gasping cold, and believed that the body was nothing but a cruel imitation."
"In the fall to the dirt and straw of the yard, she felt her heart seize with terrible understanding."
"‘Someone else will have to finish those ditches,’ she gasped, rubbing her cheek against the rough frieze."
"‘You can almost think him well,’ he had said once. ‘You can see how he will be when the sickness has passed. When we have him cured of it.’"
"For all the death in the world, each woman’s grief is her own. It takes a different shape with all of us. But the sad truth is that people will not want your grief a year after you bury your husband."
"‘How well I know you,’ she thought, and when she felt her throat noose tighter, she swallowed hard and forced her eye to the neat cobwebbing of veins across his thighs, the familiar whorl of his hair."
"‘May God comfort you,’ he said to Nóra, shaking the rain from his hat and setting it on his head."
"They piled turf on the fire and built the flames high, filled the air with smoke, and told each other stories."
"‘I am a drunk old woman crying over ghosts that do not come,’ Nóra thought."
"‘God and Mary to you,’ Nance looked up from her knife to see a shawled figure in the doorway."
"Nature is at her best in the morning and the evening. Sure, ’tis no bad thing to cry over. Most people go through their days without ever acknowledging her."
"The true nature of the cat shows in the way it uses its claws."
"You want a long spoon when supping with the Devil."
"The Good People watch us with a kind of knowing that can undo a man."
"Children are the curse of this country, especially when you don't have any."
"The world isn’t ours. It belongs to itself, and that is why it is beautiful."
"For every ill thing set upon this world, there is a cure."
"What can't be done, can't be done. I have made my peace with it."
"The Good People are cunning when they are not merry. They do what pleases them because they serve neither God nor Devil."
"How lonely waking in an empty bed had become."
"Remembered the crinkle of his eyes when she, flustered, defended them."
"How much suffering can a person bear without something turning in them?"
"Maybe the heart hardens when good fortune is not there to soften it."
"’Tis a lonely washing that has no man’s shirt in it."
"I am burdened with a dying child who will not die."
"Better that than to suffer the bridle and bit of the world."
"Some folk are forced to the edges by their difference. But 'tis at the edges that they find their power."
"There is wisdom in beginning with small charms."
"All fish are afraid of thunder, but only some know how to keep themselves out of the way of it."
"Piseógs are fires that flare in the face of those who set them."
"I curse you," she said, and they screamed. "May the grass grow high at your door, may you die without a priest in a town with no clergy, and may the crows have your carcass! Imeacht gan teacht ort! May you leave and never return!"
"I drown them. I take them down to the river, and I drown the wee things before they know any different."
"I can’t be going against the word of my aunt."
"To lay a curse is to set it on your own head."
"It might be enough to threaten the cratur with the flames."