Thin places
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Kindle Notes & Highlights
12%
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Heaven and earth, the Celtic saying goes, are only three feet apart, but in thin places that distance is even shorter. They are places that make us feel something larger than ourselves, as though we are held in a place between worlds, beyond experience.
14%
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When you’ve no home to go to because it’s been petrol bombed, seeking the wonder of the wild world is not a priority.
15%
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Time, as we know, like the sea, is a force and a creature all of its own. We can stop neither of them. We stand on the sand, watching as the days become years, as the line made by the tide disappears, as the hungry waves devour the borderline that once defined the land. People, places, experiences and the act of living a life, our days come together and we find we have grown; we are being carried in time’s salty course.
15%
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It wasn’t that my friends and colleagues were not caring and supportive people; they very much were, and still are. It was just that sometimes even the explanations are too much to bear.
16%
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The ripples of geography continue to be traced on our inner surfaces, even if our experience there was fleeting and seemed like nothing to us at the time.
18%
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The helicopters are in the sky again every night.
18%
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I do not want to be numbed to suffering again. Enough, already. Enough. Brexit, borders, barriers, identity, real and imagined. Place, the concept of home and representation of it, always massive things, now seem so much more important – even critical.
19%
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I want those spaces and places to hold a trace of us all. I want us to hold part of those places within our bodies too – I want to believe that we are in this all together – that we are connected. I need to believe that the sea and the land – the places we have been shaped and held by – will show us how to live again, will remind us how to be.
20%
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The listener said: ‘I don’t think we will be hearing from the moth again.’ Gideon Coe fell silent, as if he could find no way to respond. I sat at my kitchen table utterly aghast, angry, grieving for a moth I had never even seen, killed on a satnav in the car of a man I had never met. I turned the radio off that night, sat in a completely silent kitchen, and wept.
20%
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Naming things, in the language that should always have been offered to you, is a way to sculpt loss. A way to protect that which we still have. Naming and language, hand in hand, called to me that night.
22%
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More people have now died through suicide since the Good Friday Agreement than were killed in political violence during the Troubles.
23%
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The Irish word for hope is dóchas, or dóigh, and holds, deep within its ancient roots, glimmers of the Irish word for giving, for belonging, for beauty: dóighiúil.
31%
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The way a cheap door warps – as a pink room fills with thick black smoke – and the ripples in the wood look like the sea, like the sea on a violent, volatile night. The way that a smooth face bleeds in a way so different from a weathered, split knee. How a mangy stray cat, when called upon for action, can be as loyal as any dog. How, when your house has been set alight, you really do abandon everything – arrow-swift, nightmare-shook, carrying less than nothing in your blackening hands.
37%
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I have been affected by patterns for as long as I can remember. By the order and sequence of things and events, by the symbolism that can be strung together for our lives from small, quiet, delicate artifacts.
41%
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Grief is a country that has no definite borderlines and that recognises no single trajectory. It is a space that did not exist before your loss, and that will never disappear from your map, no matter how hard you rub at the charcoal lines. You are changed utterly, and your personal geography becomes yours and yours only.
81%
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More of our lives in the North of Ireland have now been lost through suicide than were lost to the violence of the Troubles.
96%
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time can even be a form of prayer, not to anyone or anything else. How maybe it is a form of prayer to your own self; how simply allowing yourself to be may be an act of deep and unimaginable healing, a way to give thanks.
97%
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I have been asked, over and over again, what my connection is to this place – what lines connect me to this laneway (neither blood nor marriage); what threads tie me to the middle of this island (neither biological nor historical). The only thing I know is that there is no other place I am meant to be right now; there is no other place at all. There is only the fact that when I am here it’s like I can hear Ireland’s heart, like I can hear my own, too.
98%
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Life first is dreamed, birthed and shaped in the absence of light. The seeds sown in autumn germinate underground through winter before appearing as shoots in spring.
99%
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Some people read this book in its early stages, in the midst of a global pandemic. I will never forget that, and I shall be ever grateful. To Seán Hewitt, Wendy Erskine, Dan Richards, Darran Anderson, Jill Crawford, Robert Macfarlane, Kathleen Jamie, Amy Liptrot, Max Porter and Sinéad Gleeson, with deepest gratitude. I will hold the words you gave me close to me always. To walk behind you all, on the path you carved out, moves me beyond words.
To M, the one who lit every light in the world for me, and then taught me how.