Walk the Blue Fields: 'Pure magic.' Colm Tóibín

by Claire Keegan

It’s the old game he used to love and has tired of: they put themselves down so he can easily raise them up again.

Weddings are hard. The drink flows and the words come out and he has to be there. A man loses his daughter to a younger man. A woman sees her son throwing himself away on a lesser woman. It is something they half believe. There’s the expense, the sentiment, the no going back. Any time promises are made in public, people cry.

It’s what she once wanted but two people hardly ever want the same thing at any given point in life. It is sometimes the hardest part of being human.

the tenderness in the stranger’s hands alarms him. Why is tenderness so much more disabling than injury?

The purpose of conversation was to find out what, to some extent, you already knew.

The silence is like every silence; each man is glad of it and glad, too, that it won’t last.

For five days the sergeant kept the letter in the inside pocket of his uniform. There was something hard in the letter but his desire to open it was matched by his fear of what it might contain.

Women’s minds were made of glass: so clear and yet their thoughts broke easily, yielding to other glassy thoughts that were even harder. It was enough to attract a man and frighten him all at once.

she liked getting up while the stars were still in the sky. It gave her satisfaction to see a star falling.

If only, in her adult life, her unfounded beliefs could be so abruptly disproved. To be an adult was, for the greatest part, to be in darkness.

Putting the past into words seemed idle when the past had already happened. The past was treacherous, moving slowly along. It would catch up in its own time. And in any case, what could be done? Remorse altered nothing and grief just brought it back.

Stack, like every man who has never known a woman, believed he knew a great deal about women.