The Irish Goodbye Quotes

“Keeping meticulous score was our favorite girlhood pastime, adjudicating the dispersal of the cereal boxes' plastic treasure, tallying who had more Christmas presents under the tree. When given a piece of cake to split, one sister was handed the knife. The other got to pick her half, quadruple fanatical eyeballs pressing down on the blade, its slow, slow submergence through the buttercream. And then poof. You rolled over and played dead, took yourself right out of the game. Fancy that.”
― Beth Ann Fennelly, The Irish Goodbye: Micro-Memoirs

“maybe she was just so used to getting away with everything, maybe she couldn’t believe she’d ever have to pay, flashing her devil-may-care grin over her shoulder as she fishtailed on her Big Wheel, leaving me behind in a spray of gravel, me always running, running to catch up”
― Beth Ann Fennelly, The Irish Goodbye: Micro-Memoirs

“Even now, three years later, when she opens the drawer beside the stove for an oven mitt, she finds the oven mitts folded. This is because, three years earlier, during an intense game of Scattergories, when the category was Things You Fold and the letter was O, her husband had written oven mitts. “Nobody folds oven mitts,” she scoffed, and refused him his point, forcing him, ever since, to prove it.”
― Beth Ann Fennelly, The Irish Goodbye: Micro-Memoirs

“Sometimes, in order to keep from quitting, you must bully or cajole yourself. You are fatigued from this reading, though it doesn’t show, so you get no credit for your stamina. If only, when reading difficult material, your face grew red and sweaty. If only your breathing grew ragged and labored. Like during great exertion at the gym. Dead Lift and Chest Press. Hammer Curl and Lat Raise. And now, the hardest exercise of all: Lick Finger to Turn Page. You can do it, B.A.: two more sets of eight reps.”
― Beth Ann Fennelly, The Irish Goodbye: Micro-Memoirs