So Late in the Day Quotes

“The night you asked me to marry you, you bought cherries at Lidl and told me they cost you six euros.”

“So?”

“You know what is at the heart of misogyny? When it comes down to it?”

“So I’m a misogynist now?”

“It’s simply about not giving,” she said. “Whether it’s not giving us the vote or not giving help with the dishes—it’s all clitched to the same wagon.”

“Hitched,” Cathal said.

“What?”

“It’s not ‘clitched,’ ” he said. “It’s ‘hitched.’ ”

“You see?” she said. “Isn’t this just more of the same? You knew exactly what I meant—but you cannot even give me this much.”
― Claire Keegan, So Late in the Day

“He had looked at her then and again saw something ugly about himself reflected back at him in her gaze”
― Claire Keegan, So Late in the Day

“A taste of cut grass blew in, and every now and then a warm breeze played with the ivy on the ledge. When a shadow crossed, he looked out: a gulp of swallows skirmishing, high up, in camaraderie. Down on the lawns, some people were out sunbathing and there were children, and beds plump with flowers; so much of life carrying smoothly on, despite the tangle of human conflicts and the knowledge of how everything must end.”
― Claire Keegan, So Late in the Day

“Something about this story now put the woman in mind of how she had been at another point in her life, when she was falling out of love with a separated man who had said he wanted her to live with him, a man who often said the opposite of what he felt, as though the saying of it would make it true, or hide the fact that it was not.

'I love you,' he often said. 'There is nothing I would not do for you,' he often said also.”
― Claire Keegan, So Late in the Day

“At some point, Sabine began spending most of her weekends in Arklow, and they started going to the farmers’ market together on Saturday mornings. She didn’t seem to mind the expense and bought freely: loaves of sourdough bread, organic fruits and vegetables, plaice and sole and mussels off the fish van, which came up from Kilmore Quay. Once, he’d seen her pay three euros for an ordinary-looking head of cabbage. In August, she went out along the back roads with the colander, picking blackberries off the hedges. Then, in September, a local farmer told her that she could gather the wild mushrooms from his fields. She made blackberry jam, mushroom soup. Almost everything she brought home she cooked with apparent light-handedness and ease, with what Cathal took to be love.”
― Claire Keegan, So Late in the Day

“se preguntó si alguien alguna vez estaba preparado para lo que era difícil o doloroso.”
― Claire Keegan, Bien tarde en el día

“Cunt", he said.

Although he couldn't accurately attach this word to what she was, it was something he could say, something he could call her.”
― Claire Keegan, So Late in the Day

“And then, this time last month, a moving van arrived with all her possessions: a desk and chair, a bookshelf, boxes of books and DVDs, CDs, two suitcases filled with clothes, a large Matisse print of a cat with it's paw in a fish tank, and some framed photographs of people he did not know – which she placed and hung about the house, pushing things back, as though the house now belonged to her also. A good half of her books were in French, and she looked different without her make-up, going around in a tracksuit, sweating and lifting things and making him lift and move his own things, pushing back furniture, the strain showing so clearly on her face.”
― Claire Keegan, So Late in the Day

“It occurred to him that he would not have minded her shutting up right then, and giving him what he wanted. He felt the possibility of making a joke, of defusing what had come between them, but couldn’t think of anything – and then the moment passed and she turned her head away. That was the problem with women falling out of love; the veil of romance fell away from their eyes, and they looked in and could read you.”
― Claire Keegan, So Late in the Day

“On Friday, July 29th, Dublin got the weather that had been forecast. All morning, a brazen sun shone down on Merrion Square, reaching onto Cathal’s desk, where he was stationed, by the open window. A taste of cut grass blew in, and every now and then a warm breeze played with the ivy on the ledge. When a shadow crossed, he looked out: a gulp of swallows skirmishing, high up, in camaraderie. Down on the lawns, some people were out sunbathing and there were children, and beds plump with flowers; so much of life carrying smoothly on, despite the tangle of human conflicts and the knowledge of how everything must end.”
― Claire Keegan, So Late in the Day