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Land Quotes
Land
by
Maggie O'Farrell61,255 ratings, 4.19 average rating, 8,981 reviews
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Land Quotes
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“It never ceases to amaze me how assured you priests are of your place in the scheme of things. What you refuse to see is how recent is your hold here, that the land was inhabited long before you and your kind ever arrived, with your crosses and your prayers. You will never understand how the land remembers, how deep the roots grow, how fast the stream...”
― Land
― Land
“This house is a thing both ancient and disjointed, and entity of addition and subtraction, a palimpsest of stone and wood and caulk and mud, Its existence here, on the the peninsula, is proof that everything was once something else: nothing goes away.”
― Land
― Land
“Rose has always been aware of a darkness, a roiling cloud, in her parents, a sense of rupture, a lack of rootedness. She has forever carried, like a heavy bag strapped to her back, the sense that she wasn’t able to assuage their losses: she was too small, too ignorant, to aid them, to make up for what they lacked. She didn’t know how to ask them about it, how to form those questions, where to begin, what to say. And now it was too late. They were both gone.”
― Land
― Land
“The two share the same dream: a landscape weighed down from above with great billowing clouds that part and merge, letting in the light and obscuring it, over and over again.”
― Land
― Land
“The quality of light in the copse is immediately different, verdant and lustrous, glimmering with the trembling of the leaf canopy.”
― Land
― Land
“This house is a thing both ancient and disjointed, an entity of addition and subtraction, a palimpsest of stone and wood and caulk and mud, Its existence here, on the the peninsula, is proof that everything was once something else: nothing goes away.”
― Land
― Land
“Suddenly she is sure that she can tackle whatever is ahead of her, of them, that things will turn out, because her sister has come...”
― Land
― Land
“There's a part of Rose that, when she watches her silent and mysterious brother bringing down an axe through wood or driving a plough through a field, wants to drag to his side all the people who called him "simple" or "useless" and say: Look. Do you see? I dare you to tease him now, go on, I dare you. She wants to yank them up the hillside by their collars and show them the loft full of tied stooks of hay, the walls and fences without a hole, their lean-to stacked with turf, their beasts placid and plump, and say: Guess who did all that? Not so useless after all.”
― Land
― Land
“The sensation is akin to a sudden immersion in cold water on a hot day—a bodily shift, a sense of complete alteration or release, the passing from one element into another. The word “relief” passes across his mind, like the shadow of a cloud on a landscape. More than anything, he is aware of a curious sense of cessation somewhere within him, as if a rumbling battle in which he has long been engaged has come to its weary end, and he and his opponent are at last laying down their arms and calling off their troops.”
― Land
― Land
“Nascuntur et alio modo terrae ac repente in alio mari emergunt velut paria secum faciente natura quaeque hauserit hiatus alio loco reddente.”
― Land
― Land
“Her mother’s passing has left an ache in her, a wrongness, as if a hand has pulled out the loops and ribbons of her innards, then stuffed them haphazardly back in. Every moment of every day, she has to remind herself of the unbelievable fact that her mother is gone, that she won’t see her again. She doesn’t know how this can be.”
― Land
― Land
“How odd it comes to a man one day that he cannot uproot his father from him, like an unwanted plant from the soil.”
― Land
― Land
“Lands are also formed in another way, suddenly emerging in a different sea, as if nature were compensating the earth for its losses, restoring in one place what it has swallowed up in another.”
― Land
― Land
“Their feet press down into the thick, blackened leaf-fall. Around them, the golden air is stitched with pollen and the inexplicable flight paths of bees, and teems with the sounds of a forest: birdsong, the creak of branches, the insistent tapping of a woodpecker, the drip of moisture from foliage, the secretive rustle of unseen creatures moving about the undergrowth.”
― Land
― Land
“Rose has always been aware of a darkness, a roiling cloud, in her parents, a sense of rupture, a lack of rootedness. She has forever carried, like a heavy bag strapped to her back, the sense that she wasn’t able to assuage their losses: she was too small, too ignorant, to aid them, to make up for what they lacked. She didn’t know how to ask them about it, how to form those questions, where”
― Land
― Land
“It is Tomás’s belief that it is always better to say too little than too much: many things are best left unsaid.”
― Land
― Land
“He is scrawny, in short trousers and a handed-down jacket that has been mended and re-mended by his mother. Her patches, with their fretted edges, have to Liam the fascinating appearance of postage stamps. He likes to rub at the stitches, those marks of maternal patience and devotion, with the side of his thumb.”
― Land
― Land
“Tomás knows this atrocious creature and he wants nothing more than to grab it by the neck and throttle it with his bare hands if it dares come any nearer. It is, of course, hunger. Tomás is hungry.”
― Land
― Land
“help, the curious way they addressed each other as “Friend.” He knew in the core of himself, he could not say why, that when they said “orphanage” they in fact meant “workhouse,” which was a word that carried dread and shame; such a place would lock you away and you might never come out again, so he tried to run, tried to pull himself from the grasp of the men with starched collars, who had him by the wrist. He had been warned of the dangers of the workhouse, he knew, by someone who loved him. So he kicked out, wrested himself free, slipped through an alleyway between two dwellings, his bare feet skidding on rounded pebbles, but one of the men came after him and there was such a weakness in Tomás’s limbs, and here now was the other man, waiting at the far end of the alleyway, and between them they caught him up, loaded him into their cart and took him with them. Of the cart Tomás possesses a clearer sense. The sway and creak of the axle, the tittuping hoofs of the two donkeys pulling it, the filthy and stricken faces of the other children who were collected, as he had been, from villages and verges. The countryside reeling past, empty and denuded; patches of land mere churned mud pierced with drooping and blackened stalks, and the fenced and guarded fields of the landlords filled with waving, golden corn. A gulley outside a town with a curious humpy shape that he thought might be a haystack but when they got closer, it began to resemble a heap of human bodies, left there under the sky, and”
― Land
― Land
“how odd that it comes to a man one day that he cannot uproot his father from him, like an unwanted plant from the soil. There are no boundary walls between them; the two are one and the same.”
― Land
― Land
“She has for ever carried, like a heavy bag strapped to her back, the sense that she wasn’t able to assuage their losses: she was too small, too ignorant, to aid them, to make up for what they lacked. She didn’t know how to ask them about it, how to form those questions, where to begin, what to say. And now it was too late. They were both gone.”
― Land
― Land
“Oceans are not blue, Enda discovers. They are not the azure of the bays and inlets of the peninsula, where yellow-shelled creatures cling to rocks and frail scarlet seaweed waltzes in the clear, white-frothed waves. Neither are they the mild cerulean of her father’s maps. This ocean, the one she is crossing, yard by yard, day by day, week by week – and to call it a singular ‘ocean’ rather than ‘oceans’ seems an error because its vastness, its boundlessness, its terrifyingly endless expanse implies plurality, how can something this large be one ocean alone? – is shifting and various, impossible to pin down.”
― Land
― Land