Plague Journal Quotes

“Woolley, why do you always play it so safe? You should try being a loser once in a while. It’s good for the soul, and you learn so much in the process. One of the things you learn is that reality, on a human scale, is never final. Evil is not absolute. You must never lose hope. There is a more complete reality that exists beyond the clutching fingers of our senses and our proud intellects. Try to find it, my friend. Don’t let the liars win. It matters that you do, Woolley, it matters. Everything we do and say is counted. The universe isn’t on trial. We are.”
― Michael D. O'Brien, Plague Journal

“I understand your pain. The most horrible pain is to think that your pain counts for nothing. You either wrestle that lie to the ground, or it wins and you run from it. Real men don’t run, Woolley. Oh, I’ll grant you, they should run from dumb kids fantasizing with machine guns and helicopters. And we should probably run from a virus or a bomb or a maniac. But we can’t ever run from the wrestling match that is within. If we do, we end up hating ourselves and hating everyone else forever.”
― Michael D. O'Brien, Plague Journal

“If I cry, it’s not the bitter waters of despair but the sweet waters of a cleansing grief. Woolley would probably quip that real men don’t cry. Wrong, Woolley, only real men cry. They have hearts to accompany their prodigious minds and their bravado. Please don’t lie to me any more, old chap. I know that somewhere, in some dark room, when all the medals and honors and diplomas are invisible, you, too, cry for your lost love and for a world that might have been and is no more.”
― Michael D. O'Brien, Plague Journal

“I look back once. The two men and the children are standing motionless, watching us. The meek shall inherit the earth, I think it says someplace.”
― Michael D. O'Brien, Plague Journal

“Maya left me because she was pumped full of every distorted perception that our century has been able to produce. But she also left me because I was not listening and because I failed to love, and she needed to be loved very, very much in order to resist the distortions. But I was too busy.”
― Michael D. O'Brien, Plague Journal

“Clear sight demands that we cast a glance within. There, in the old garage sales of the heart are to be found a few embarrassing items.”
― Michael D. O'Brien, Plague Journal

“He forgave them.” I ponder that. “That’s nice, Father, but what would have happened if they had killed him in the first place?” “Perhaps his great heart would have forgiven them even then.” “Do you know that?” “I know only one thing.” “Which is . . . ?” “The human will is a great mystery. We choose. We choose to hate. We choose to forgive. We are free to do either.” I don’t like what he’s saying. I’m angry. “Are you telling me we have no right to be upset about injustice?!” “You have every right to be angry. What is happening is evil. But if the evil infects you with evil, then it has won a hundredfold.” I feel an anguish so terrible it threatens to tear my chest. “Your anger is just,” he continues in his kindly voice, “but your hatred is not.”
― Michael D. O'Brien, Plague Journal

“I hate the people who hurt her. I hate the man who murdered my great-grandfather Finbar back in Ireland almost a century ago. I hate MacPhale, who bought up this town and turned it into a factory. I hate the hell-cops. And I hate the gutless men who could have prevented the degeneration of our flawed but sane society into a landscape where all appears well but is not well. Indeed, it is perhaps sick unto death. And I hate the lies that blind my sincere father, and I hate the people who made the Thu family suffer, and the people who made the Jews suffer, and the ones who make Blacks and Catholics suffer, and the moderates who make us all suffer by their calm, measured assurances that all is well, all is well, all shall be exceedingly well. I can’t forgive what’s being done to us, the strangling of everything that’s beautiful and true and good. The strangest of their lies is that, as the world dies, they say they are giving us an enhanced life. I find this an especially cruel form of deception. I hate them most of all for drugging everyone. Most people have been lulled into total apathy by the narcotic. I just barely saved Tyler and Zöe from becoming zombie consumers. I hate . . . yes, to put it simply, I hate this thing that has poisoned an entire world. Me, I think I’ll just choose to remain awake until the last moment, guilty, full of aches and pains, neurotic as all get-out, dysfunctional to the end. At least I’m alive.”
― Michael D. O'Brien, Plague Journal

“By the way, Ed, aren’t you a sort of tyrant with that newspaper of yours? You’re a pretty lucky fellow to be able to tell the world off once a week. One might even say you’re a bit of a bully.” “Check, mate.” We laughed and drank up some more.”
― Michael D. O'Brien, Plague Journal

“The sneer was especially galling because it came from the enlightened, from people she secretly admired. Vibrant, intelligent, cultured people, who jogged and took holidays in Communist China or snorkeled in the Caribbean and who read the latest books and had token families. They were robust into their seventies, and they leaned far to the left on their ski poles. They believed it was better to kill a child than to kill a whale. I believed that both were forms of violation, but the former was surely the greater evil. Maya agreed with me in theory until she gradually discovered that all the best people thought differently. She wanted to be countercultural and a social success. She didn’t mind despising that poor old yuppie and his kind for their blindness, but she never did learn to take it when they despised her in turn for failing to hold the correct opinions. There was a new orthodoxy abroad in the land, and she had somehow missed the cue during her few years tucked away in a remote valley with good old reactionary me. When she finally figured out what our way of life would cost, she began to suffer. She had been taught from birth to avoid unpleasantness. As a result, her inability to deal with the peculiar existential pain of the anathematized, the social pariah, later undid our marriage.”
― Michael D. O'Brien, Plague Journal

“I didn’t know it then, but the cost of a happy family is the death of selfishness. The father must die if he is to give life to his spouse and children. Not a pleasant thought but a true one. An entire lifetime can be spent avoiding it. It’s simply not enough to provide and protect. In themselves, of course, providing and protecting are good and necessary things. That is our responsibility. But a father can provide a mountain of material goods for his family and defend it against all kinds of inconveniences, thinking he can rest easy, having done his part, and still have missed the essential point: he is called to be an image of love and truth. The house he provides, be it a cabin, a mansion, or a barge painted Christmas colors, must have at its core a heart that is willing to look at its poverty. As long as we’re convinced of our own strengths, our cleverness, and our cagey ability to endure, we still think we’re in charge. We construct a life-style of eliminating difficulties at any cost. It takes a lot of padding if you’re to avoid the unexplainable, unjust blows of suffering. There will come a time, however, when this elaborate defense system crumbles.”
― Michael D. O'Brien, Plague Journal

“Is this the word I have waited for all of my life? Did it take a lifetime of preparation? If it had come too early, would I have held it in my heart the way I do now? How many, many nights have I begged for a word from beyond the boundaries of our mortality and, hearing none, suspected that out there beyond the last homely house, out there in the unexplored territory, there was . . . was what? Nothingness? I have jumped to ridiculous conclusions all my life. The arrogance of the educated, of course. How often have I begged to know, and instead was given the way of unknowing? Little did I understand that it’s the best way of all.”
― Michael D. O'Brien, Plague Journal

“He didn’t reprimand me. Just looked me in the eye and said, “Tanny, a shepherd who loves his flock doesn’t cull the black lambs or the mixed breeds without first finding out what’s good in them.”
― Michael D. O'Brien, Plague Journal

“Where has it all gone, I ask? Is it still there, just waiting to be found again? So many of us have been scattered. So many missing. Where is the birth and death we used to share? Why did we not understand what was happening when the family began to disintegrate? Why did we not resist it? Why did we not fight against the corruption of our culture? Why did we not pray as we ought? Did we defend the little ones from the ravages of wolves? And now, lo these many years later, do we any longer cherish the very old and the very sick? Do we tolerate the young in noisy, demanding numbers? Do we bear with dignity the pain of existence (and the beauty of it), or avoid it at any cost? Have we lost bit by bit our reverence for the mystery of a human life, losing in the process our ability to love the poor and the plain and the mad and the difficult-to-live-with, the enemies, the saints, and the sinners? Is it our own face we see reflected in the mirror of their eyes?”
― Michael D. O'Brien, Plague Journal

“She gave me a look. “It has to be right”, she growled. “It has to be all good, or it’s no damn good at all.” I thought about that. And it struck me suddenly how different my generation was from hers. She told me once that people have changed a lot since she was a young woman. It’s true. We are different. We rush through our lives trying to get it all in, trying to get too many things done too fast. And as a result we make hasty decisions. We don’t appreciate things all that much. We’re seldom grateful. We work and play and consume on the run. We “improve” our minds on the run. We advance our careers on the run. We talk and cook and eat on the run. We settle for junk food, mass-produced filler that looks and smells and even tastes like food. We rarely choose to make a thing with passionate love for its being. We have developed the habit of doing many things poorly rather than a few things well. Is it really possible to think clearly in such a state?”
― Michael D. O'Brien, Plague Journal

“Another great twentieth-century cliché. The time to discuss this was ten, twenty years ago. The social engineering class was just then gathering momentum. Counselors, therapists, social workers, psychologists, and facilitators of one sort or another sprouted everywhere. There was no denying that professional services were occasionally of help to families, but it should have been obvious that something was seriously wrong when the help became a growth industry. It soon became a way of life and eventually an entire culture. Now, ten, twenty years farther along, it has become nearly impossible to resist. There are few who aren’t mesmerized by utopian dreams and alluring models of social reconstruction.”
― Michael D. O'Brien, Plague Journal

“I had believed in the power of my insights; I thought I could salvage the world by my intellect and my pen. I learned too late that most people aren’t interested. They don’t think. They make their decisions about practically everything according to their feelings, their subjective impressions of reality. I had assumed that my father, who is a cool rationalist, would be immune to the impressionism that has invaded everything. In the end even he proved vulnerable to its seductions. I know that it was right to keep the paper going and to fight the erosion of civilization as long as I could. At the same time, I have trusted far too much in my own ability to convince others. I have not prayed as I ought. Is this my own share in the guilt?”
― Michael D. O'Brien, Plague Journal

“So, where does that leave us? An ugly little power struggle is where it leaves us. The difference between your experts and our experts is that yours want to save collective humanity, and ours want to save each human being. You’d turn them into a number in a computer bank—for their own good, of course. We want to restore your so-called masses to a sense of their individual personhood. That’s the only way a real community, a real nation, and a sane world come about. By freeing people to be what they truly are, one by one, person by person.” “That’s the slow method.” “It’s the sure one.”
― Michael D. O'Brien, Plague Journal

“Huxley maintained that, in the future, democracy and freedom would be the subject of every broadcast and editorial, but the underlying substance would be a seemingly benign totalitarianism. It has been pointed out by a few sane men that this kind of totalitarianism is the worst of all, the most inhumane, impossible to throw off because it can always argue that it’s not in fact what it is.”
― Michael D. O'Brien, Plague Journal

“I don’t know about utopia, but I think it now lies within our power to make a decent world, where children don’t go to bed hungry or afraid.” Actually, he was defending the new quality-of-life laws. He didn’t especially like the murder of children, but he thought every parent should have the right to do it. He had absolutized rights and radically devalued life. A weird cosmos, if you ask me. He even supported a party that would one day force us to pay for it through taxes. “By eliminating children, you do indeed eliminate a great deal of hunger and fear”, I said.”
― Michael D. O'Brien, Plague Journal

“That day I hadn’t yet begun to learn silence. I was a noisy firecracker exploding with a rage so deep that I failed to see how it darkened the light of my words. People don’t listen much to angry men who vent their anger. By contrast, an angry man who controls his rage and forges it into cool thought is an estimable force in society. But I hadn’t yet learned this primal lesson. I thought words were all you needed. I believed that everyone would be convinced if I just explained things properly. I didn’t suspect for a moment that they weren’t quite as desperate for the truth as I was. In the process I lost an important truth.”
― Michael D. O'Brien, Plague Journal

“A bit more than a theory. You know, every time I scratch beneath the surface of an optimist, I find somebody wrestling with despair.” “According to your theory, then, what’s a pessimist?” “Same thing, just another form of thinly disguised despair.” “So what are you, Tan?” “A realist.”
― Michael D. O'Brien, Plague Journal

“Pride, it’ll get you in the end every time. My pride lay in thinking I could save the world single-handedly. Your pride lay in a terror of being caught in the act of blowing your liberal credentials. You didn’t even know it. You couldn’t admit your addiction to politically correct opinions. You scoffed at the reality of dragons, and as a result they pinned you to the ground as you loudly denied their existence. You thought that by your skepticism you had escaped mythology, and all the while a myth was eating you alive. Try to remember that last conversation, Pa. Try.”
― Michael D. O'Brien, Plague Journal

“Tan, I want to believe you, but don’t you think kidnapping the children is a little extreme?” “Dad! Listen to yourself. Kidnapping my own kids? They’re my kids, dammit! I don’t have to kidnap them. The State is supposed to justify to me anything they propose doing with my children, not the other way around. It’s all been turned upside down, don’t you see? Until recently it was the parents who let the government educate them for six hours a day, on loan, on trust. Now they think we have to justify our parenting to them, and they loan the kids back to us, on trust.”
― Michael D. O'Brien, Plague Journal

“I teach them to break and corrupt and ruin and I make them think they are creating. That is my highest skill. I go where I will, doing as I please. “Only for a brief time.”
― Michael D. O'Brien, Plague Journal

“In the garden stands an ancient tree. The children sleep beneath it. The white hart circles the children, protecting them. The serpent bellows and coils to strike. The children awake and cry out. The hart stands firm as the beast weaves back and forth, tearing the air with its claws. It lunges forward to deliver a killing blow. The hart intercepts it, though his white hide is now raked with red. He is bleeding heavily. His eyes are golden. They are full of fire. He rears his rack of antlers and strikes an unexpected blow in return. The beast reels backward, and its malice smolders.”
― Michael D. O'Brien, Plague Journal

“there is no room left in the world. It’s an increasingly narrow place.”
― Michael D. O'Brien, Plague Journal

“You mustn’t hate them”, he said to me once when I was a boy and raging against injustice. Yes, I was an early rager. “Tan,” he said, “you aren’t just angry with their foolish ideas, you’re angry with them. Be careful, lad, or you’ll end by hating them.” “I do hate them, Grandpa. I hate their stupid, deceiving guts!” How grieved the old man had been on that day. His eyes had filled with tears. “If you hate them, you’ll become like them, and maybe worse than them, no matter how many things you get straight in your mind.”
― Michael D. O'Brien, Plague Journal

“She had been raised in an enlightened New Age family, Fabians, Liberals, cultured revolutionaries without a revolution. She had early on recognized the stifling air of their own peculiar form of social romance and fled. During the last world war she purchased The Echo and remained its editor for more than thirty years. She was always a loner, an intellectual with no one to talk to except in the words that could be translated to Stiofain. He was as deep as she, perhaps deeper, but he was no rationalist. He was mystical and cultured after the ancient Irish way, and he was the sort of Catholic who goes to the gallows rather than step on a crucifix. He died in the bed where Bam is now sleeping. He was in his nineties when he went, and most people thought him a half-wit. But I knew better. I spent many an hour asking him questions about everything from the cosmos to horseshoes, and he had answers. But he had to be asked. Grandma, on the other hand, was always ready with a perceptive analysis, whether you asked for it or not. They had a very odd marriage that somehow worked.”
― Michael D. O'Brien, Plague Journal

“Maybe I could embellish it with one of those fustian English subtitles: Plague Journal: A Cautionary Tale, chronicling Extraordinary Events occurring at the end of an age, including a mosaic of notes, letters, newspaper clippings, airplane tickets, didactic dialogues, confessions, poems, humorous sallies, and laments—in short, Thoughts both edifying and disedifying, for the purpose of Self-Examination.”
― Michael D. O'Brien, Plague Journal