The Carnival at Bray Quotes

“That's what living people do. They shatter and rebuild, shatter and rebuild, shatter and rebuild until they are old and worn and stooped from the work of it.”
― Jessie Ann Foley, The Carnival at Bray

“Everything that ever happens to you only happens once, so you better never stop paying attention.”
― Jessie Ann Foley, The Carnival at Bray

“By the time the clock had moved past midnight on Christmas 1993, they finally clicked the last piece into place: Angola, nestled between Zaire and Namibia and bordering the vast lapping Atlantic. Then, having succeeded in putting the world back together, they went to bed.”
― Jessie Ann Foley, The Carnival at Bray

“Maggie nodded. She was more than okay. Not only was she no longer sick, she felt as if she'd just awoken from the long, safe torpor of her childhood. The night had blasted her free of that shell, and she had emerged new and raw and ready. She felt the ticket stub folded carefully in her pocket. How many kids in Bray would be able to say they'd stood just feet from Billy Corgan, that they'd been at the Metro for the "Siamese Dream" record release show, that they'd seen Lake Shore Drive on a Sunday morning through the prism of a concert comedown, the runners looking so silly with their skinny legs and their neon shorts, chugging along the footpath with their calorie counters and Gatorade?”
― Jessie Ann Foley, The Carnival at Bray

“Maggie sipped her drink with the cat draped across her lap and the dog curled at her feet. The only sounds in the room were the crackling of the fire and Dan Sean's shallow snores. There were no CD's to play, no radio, no television. There was nothing. She was just sitting there in silence, getting drunk. It occurred to her that a person's first drunken experience shoud be in the basement of a friend's house, in a forest preserve, behind the bleachers of a football field. Certainly not in the company of a sleeping ninety-nine-year-old man. She giggled a little and wondered what Uncle Kevin would make of it. "Hot port?" he would say. "Very impressive, Mags. I would have thought you'd be more of a wine cooler type of girl.”
― Jessie Ann Foley, The Carnival at Bray

“Old couples began to pair off and spin each other around, and the younger ones lined the walls, clapping and stomping their feet and swishing their drinks. In that little pub, on that little stage by the windows, Kevin was a life force, a star. With the aid of an instrument, he could spend four hours in a new country and fit in better than Maggie could after four months. He sang about drunk tanks and love and Christmas hopes, but in the spaces between the words of the song and in the cold shadows of his closed eyes rested all the things that he allowed to escape from himself only on the stage. Watching him, Maggie thought of their conversation earlier that day--how he had quit the band, quit his music, hadn't picked up a guitar in months. She could see the way he picked gingerly at the strings on his uncalloused fingers. His voice wasn't beautiful, but it had always contained a kind of arresting truth. Now too, Maggie detected a new quality--a desperation that had not been there before. Looking around the table at her family, she knew that Nanny Eli heard it, too. Her grandmother was leaning forward, holding her cigarette aloft while the ash grew longer and longer, and she was not listening to her son like the rest of them were but watching him, the movements of his long, skeletal fingers, the closed bruises of his eyes.”
― Jessie Ann Foley, The Carnival at Bray

“She was going to stay, an she was going to love Eoin, always, because that's what living people do. They shatter and rebuild, shatter and rebuild, shatter and rebuild until they are old and worn and stooped from the work of it.”
― Jessie Ann Foley, The Carnival at Bray

“There was no point in explaining that she had no friends - that kind of personal over-sharing would only come off as cringingly American.”
― Jessie Ann Foley, The Carnival at Bray

“... with the cruel, odd truth that when your life implodes, it shatters nothing but your own insides. ...All of this was a realization to Maggie that her life was its own tiny matter, and that the rest of the world carried on, obliious and imperious to her aftershocks.”
― Jessie Ann Foley, The Carnival at Bray

“I’m not going!” she screamed, grabbing her mother by the shoulder. But Laura didn’t even turn around. She hiccupped, once, and watery vomit splashed onto the floor between her legs. Maggie let go of her mother’s shoulder then, her rage replaced not exactly with pity, but with such a tired disgust with her whole pathetic family that she gave up. Kevin never came home at all that night, and the next afternoon, Nanny Ei drove them to O’Hare.”
― Jessie Ann Foley, The Carnival at Bray

“Bootlegs totally defeat the purpose of going to a show. They take away from the preciousness of the lived experience. It happened. You were there for it. And now it’s your responsibility to remember it, not to try and re-create it all the time by listening to some shittily recorded attempt at preservation.”
― Jessie Ann Foley, The Carnival at Bray

“Do you think they’ll get back sooner?” “And interrupt honeymoon time?” Maggie laughed. “Be serious.” “What does that even mean?” “I’ll tell you when you’re my age.” “But that’s what you said about ‘douche,’ and ‘condom,’ and the first line of that Liz Phair song,” Ronnie complained.”
― Jessie Ann Foley, The Carnival at Bray

“In the month that she had lived at Bray, Maggie had felt pockets of this-this slowing down of time, these reverberations into the past. In America, everything was replaceable; ld stuf was thrown away quickly and entirely to make way for the next thing. But in Ireland, the ruined castles that dotted the landscape, the crumbling stnes walls that crisscrossed long-held family fields, these all provided the sense that the past drifted, but did not disappear. It was all around you, like mist.”
― Jessie Ann Foley, The Carnival at Bray

“The show was chaos--moshing, shattered bottles, and music so loud that it didn't even feel like music but just a thumping in her chest, a wailing guitar, and Billy Corgan, who screamed until his throat sounded blood-gargled. After an hour, Maggie lost Uncle Kevin and stumbled through the crowd, fighting the urge not to panic, and then she found him in a corner making out with a blond woman whose shirt was all cut up so that Maggie could see not just the woman's cleavage but the cleavage _under_ her boobs--she had not known this was possible. He pulled away from the woman, wrapped Maggie in a sweaty hug, and took her up to the bar and bought her a pop. She drank it, fighting the feeling of exhaustion and fever that had descended on her brain and sinuses, and when it was over and the lights were turned on to reveal a shiny-eyed crowd wafting animal smells and trembling down from whatever high they'd been on, the music had latched hold of her. She felt half-crazed, elated, having forever transcended the world of high school, where she was noteworthy only for her ability to diagram sentences faster and more accurately than anyone else in Mr. Blackwell's English class. One thing was for sure: she would never diagram another sentence, at least not willingly, for as long as she lived.”
― Jessie Ann Foley, The Carnival at Bray

“It must be hard to be a mother. All those years of knowing everything about your daughter... an then one day you wake up and realize you don't even know what kind of dress to buy her at Clery's.”
― Jessie Ann Foley, The Carnival at Bray

“But Kevin's suicide had not had that effect on Maggie. It didn't make her want to die but to live.”
― Jessie Ann Foley, The Carnival at Bray

“Not that I envy peple who have suffered. But don't you think that neer suffering at all - is its own form of suffering? (Ashley)”
― Jessie Ann Foley, The Carnival at Bray

“How can he still love his mother, who almost killed him, she wondered, when sometimes I hate mine and I don't even know why?”
― Jessie Ann Foley, The Carnival at Bray

“But then again, as Maggie had seen with her own mother, falling in love turns people into strangers and fanatics, people with a wil faith in their new beloved that borders on the religious.”
― Jessie Ann Foley, The Carnival at Bray

“She had never seen one on a woman,”
― Jessie Ann Foley, The Carnival at Bray

“Though”
― Jessie Ann Foley, The Carnival at Bray