A Radiant Life Quotes

“What is not challenged from outside is open to corruption from within.
-This is the infinite value of a dissenting voice: that where it is not allowed to flourish, an institution- a school or an orphanage or a government or a media consensus....begins to slide toward allowing its worst energies into play.”
― Nuala O'Faolain, A Radiant Life: The Selected Journalism

“States have no goodness. They suppress these villains here and promote those villains there, with no aim but self-aggrandizement.”
― Nuala O'Faolain, A Radiant Life: The Selected Journalism

“families hunted, finally, in 1847, from the townland of Ballykilcline, County Roscommon. He goes with them from their tumbled cabins in the bog to the square in Strokestown, where they were rounded up for the four-day journey to Dublin, and then he sails with them to Liverpool, and he accompanies them through their humiliations there, until he must leave them, where they fall out of history, as they huddle into steerage to cross the ocean to New York. It was a terrible journey. On the road to Dublin most of the ragged band were “debilitated from at least a year”
― Nuala O' Faolain, A Radiant Life: The Selected Journalism of Nuala O'Faolain