More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Some said the O’Malleys had too much saltwater in their veins to be good and god-fearing, or good anything else for that matter.
There’s an old woman, though, with plans and plots of long gestation; and there’s the sea, which will have her due, come hell or high water; and there are secrets and lies which never stay buried forever.
If I know anything for certain it’s that neither love nor hate is ever simple.
Just hang on to whatever’s solid, Óisín would say, but it took me a long time to realise he meant I had to rely on myself: I was the only solid thing in that angry sea.
‘Stories are history, whether they’re true or not,’
Neither of the remaining O’Malley ships are in port and who knows when they’ll return, or if? Will their bellies be filled with cargo or will they have given it all up to pirates? Do they already sleep on the bottom of the ocean, hulls splintered, mariners drowned, their eyes eaten by fish, their bones become thrones for crabs?
Some folk make a point of not visiting pain on others when it’s been done to them; most people, though, think it’s their due to inflict a little of their own agony.
‘Very few people are entirely good or bad, missy, but some ignore the calling of one or the other better than the rest of us.’
A secret seldom survives being shared.’
The thing about avoiding other people is that you spend a lot of time with your own thoughts and mine are neither pleasant nor useful for I have no answers, merely speculations and more questions.
Love is a barbed hook and family the line to which it is tied. It digs deep and sometimes trying to remove it entirely does more damage than simply leaving the obstruction beneath the skin for a scar to grow over.
This road, I must accept, is the one less travelled by.
Still, all change is painful, cutting and cauterising yourself for something better.
And a trace of a tale is all that’s needed to find your way in the world.
‘A simple matter when all the waters in the world are joined.’
He told her all these things in the sanctity of the lovers’ confessional; he told her for lovers think that in sharing what is secret they tie the beloved to them. Yet the untruth of this is only ever uncovered in the aftermath, and thus are covenants broken and hearts soon after.
And those who believed knew that holiness is neither black nor white, but the red of blood.
for all the waters in the world are joined.’ I say this last like a prayer.
She cannot bear the burden of her parents’ sins,
I’m Miren Elliott now, for it’s what I can bear – you claim what you can endure from your once-life and burn the rest.
‘I don’t need you,’ I say, ‘I want you. That should be enough. That should be better because it means I’ve made a choice.’
