Coreen > Coreen's Quotes

“We are going to the moon that is not very far. Man has so much farther to go within himself.”
― Anaïs Nin

“Limerick gained a reputation for piety, but we knew it was only the rain.”
― Frank McCourt, Angela’s Ashes

“There was a certain untamed energy about the west of Ireland – full of tragedy and struggle, sown with the flesh of the departed.”
― Rhian J. Martin

“She took the sea with her
Not beaches but the grey
relentless Irish sea,
its rhythm and the crying gulls.”
― Caroline Davies

“It has taken almost half my life away from Ireland for me to truly feel what home really is, and it is not what I was expecting. In the end it was not a place, or a past, or any sort of single, dazzling epiphany. It was all the little things. Cold butter spread thick on sweet wheaten bread or hot, subsiding potatoes; the scent of wet, black soil; a bushy spine of grass on a one-track road; wife iron gates leading to high beech corridors; the chalky smell of a cow's wet muzzle, and, most of all, in Seamus Heaney's words, the sound of rivers in the trees.”
― Trish Deseine, Home: Recipes from Ireland

“Milk was used in various forms during the summer months; in winter beer or water was used. Bread, cakes, potatoes, and sea food were the principal foods. Animal flesh was not used commonly due to the inconvenience of storing. Turf was the common fuel.”
― William Petty

“You were so intent on what your purpose would be. I remember it nearly word for word."
"Recite it for me then, my Lainna."
She smiled a warm, soft smile, and her eyes filled with light.
"You would waken in your bedchamber with your lady beside you...”
― Leigh Ann Edwards, The Farrier's Daughter

“Ireland is still what novelist Edna O'Brien calls a "pagan place." But that paganism does not conflict with a devout Catholicism that embraces and absorbs it, in a way that can seem mysterious, even heretical, elsewhere. In Ireland, Christianity arrived without lions and gladiators, survived without autos-da-fe and Inquisitions. The old ways were seamlessly bonded to the new, so that ancient rituals continued, ancient divinities became saints, ancient holy sites were maintained just as they had been for generations and generations.”
― Patricia Monaghan, The Red-Haired Girl from the Bog: The Landscape of Celtic Myth and Spirit

“So does nobody care about Ireland?"
"Nobody. Neither King Louis, nor King Billie, nor King James." He nodded thoughtfully. "The fate of Ireland will be decided by men not a single one of whom gives a damn about her. That is her tragedy.”
― Edward Rutherfurd, The Rebels of Ireland

“You can do what you like, sir, but I'll tell you this. New York is the true capital of America. Every New Yorker knows it, and by God, we always shall.”
― Edward Rutherfurd, New York

“So much held in a heart in a lifetime. So much held in a heart in a day, an hour, a moment. We are utterly open with no one, in the end -- not mother and father, not wife or husband, not lover, not child, not friend. We open windows to each but we live alone in the house of the heart. Perhaps we must. Perhaps we could not bear to be so naked, for fear of a constantly harrowed heart. When young we think there will come one person who will savor and sustain us always; when we are older we know this is the dream of a child, that all hearts finally are bruised and scarred, scored and torn, repaired by time and will, patched by force of character, yet fragile and rickety forevermore, no matter how ferocious the defense and how many bricks you bring to the wall. You can brick up your heart as stout and tight and hard and cold and impregnable as you possibly can and down it comes in an instant, felled by a woman's second glance, a child's apple breath, the shatter of glass in the road, the words 'I have something to tell you,' a cat with a broken spine dragging itself into the forest to die, the brush of your mother's papery ancient hand in a thicket of your hair, the memory of your father's voice early in the morning echoing from the kitchen where he is making pancakes for his children.”
― Brian Doyle, One Long River of Song: Notes on Wonder

“Once upon a time, when women were birds, there was the simple understanding that to sing at dawn and to sing at dusk was to heal the world through joy. The birds still remember what we have forgotten, that the world is meant to be celebrated.”
― Terry Tempest Williams, When Women Were Birds: Fifty-four Variations on Voice

“I had the impression that I was damned, even though all I had done was to be as God made me, and as I lay in bed staring up at the ceiling, I saw no difference between God’s justice and man’s injustice.”
― Olaf Olafsson, The Sacrament

“I do not speak with the tongues of angels, nor have my prayers ever moved mountains...and yet, despite everything, I still cling to the belief that if I do not have love, I am nothing”
― Olaf Olafsson, The Sacrament

“There was a misspelling on the headstone which the moss had not yet covered. We spoke of everything except for what was on our mind. When we left the graveyard, hand in hand, you asked: Why is it always our mistakes that linger in our memory?”
― Olaf Olafsson, The Sacrament