The Loney Quotes

“I often thought there was too much time there. That the place was sick with it. Haunted by it. Time didn't leak away as it should. There was nowhere for it to go and no modernity to hurry it along. It collected as the black water did on the marshes and remained and stagnated in the same way.”
― Andrew Michael Hurley, The Loney

“Hell was a place ruled by the logic of children.”
― Andrew Michael Hurley, The Loney

“Pity is the only thing a drunk has in abundance.”
― Andrew Michael Hurley, The Loney

“Life here arose of its own accord and for no particular reason. It went unexamined, and died unremembered.”
― Andrew Michael Hurley, The Loney

“It was a safari park of degradation. What a world without God looked like.”
― Andrew Michael Hurley, The Loney

“not noticing, or wilfully ignoring, the look of horror that Mummer tried to slide discreetly his way, as though on a folded piece of paper. Without”
― Andrew Michael Hurley, The Loney

“Routine was a fact of life. It was life, in fact.”
― Andrew Michael Hurley, The Loney

“I don’t believe people always want money. Not when there’s something more important to them. Money you can piss away like ale. What people really want is something that’s going to last.”
― Andrew Michael Hurley, The Loney

“God has no time for deceivers.”
― Andrew Michael Hurley, The Loney

“Fear can make people do funny things.”
― Andrew Michael Hurley, The Loney

“Perhaps being a priest was like being a fish. Immersion for life.”
― Andrew Michael Hurley, The Loney

“It was a safari park of degradation.”
― Andrew Michael Hurley, The Loney

“Like most drunks, Billy by-passed the small talk and slapped his bleeding, broken heart into my palm like a lump of raw beef.”
― Andrew Michael Hurley, The Loney

“Mummer would tell us these tales over the dinner table without a flicker of doubt that God’s hand was at work in the world, as it had been in the time of the saints and martyrs, the violent deaths of whom were regularly inflicted upon us as exempla of not only the unconditional oath we had to make to the service of the Lord, but of the necessity of suffering. The worse the torment, the more God was able to make Himself known, Mummer said, invoking the same branch of esoteric mathematics Father Wilfred used in his sermons to explain why the world was full of war and murder – a formula by which cruelty could be shown to be inversely proportionate to mercy. The more inhumane the misery we could inflict upon one another, the more compassionate God seemed as a counterpoint to us. It was through pain that we would know how far we still had to go to be perfect in His eyes. And so, unless one suffered, Father Wilfred was wont to remind us, one could not be a true Christian.”
― Andrew Michael Hurley, The Loney

“Father Wilfred had told us time and time again that it was our duty as Christians to see what our faith had taught us to see. And consequently Mummer used to come home from the shop with all kinds of stories about how God had seen fit to reward the good and justly punish the wicked. The lady who worked at the bookmakers had developed warts on her fingers from handling dirty money all day long. The Wilkinson girl, who had visited the clinic on the Finchley Road that the women at Saint Jude’s talked about in hushed tones, had been knocked down by a car not a week later and had her pelvis snapped beyond repair. Conversely, an elderly lady who came into the shop every week for prayer cards and had spent much of the previous decade raising money for Cafod, won a trip to Fatima.”
― Andrew Michael Hurley, The Loney

“You know,’ he said, ‘my daddy used to say that death has the timing of the world’s worst comedian and I think he was right.”
― Andrew Michael Hurley, The Loney

“One merely became qualified to pass from one system to the next, that was all. Routine was a fact of life. It was life, in fact.”
― Andrew Michael Hurley, The Loney

“Indeed, all his parishioners deserved to feel like Miss Bunce. Different, loved, guided and judged. It was their reward for being held to ransom by a world that demanded the right to engage in moral brinkmanship whenever it pleased.”
― Andrew Michael Hurley, The Loney

“Look first,’ he had told him. ‘And then see. Be patient and you will notice the workings of nature that most people miss.”
― Andrew Michael Hurley, The Loney

“Once the tables had been wiped clean, Mummer draped the dishcloth over the tap in the kitchen, Farther switched off the lights and we went out into the slush. It seemed an absurd ending to a life.”
― Andrew Michael Hurley, The Loney

“And that’s the trick, Tonto. Making them believe that you know what the right answer is. God knows if I’d been honest about what I knew, the whole place would have gone up in flames. They shouldn’t call us priests. Not when we’re really firemen.”
― Andrew Michael Hurley, The Loney

“Tonto, the truth isn’t always set in stone. In fact it never is. There are just versions of it. And sometimes it’s prudent to be selective about the version you choose to give to people.’ ‘But that’s lying, Father. You said so yourself.’ ‘Then I was being as naive as you.”
― Andrew Michael Hurley, The Loney

“I don’t remember either of us trying to run or fight or do anything, for that matter. I only remember the smell of the wet ferns, the sound of water churning out of a gutter, the feeling of numbness, knowing that no one was coming to help us and that we were surrounded by those people Father Wilfred had always warned us about but who we never thought we’d face, not really. Those people who existed in the realm of newspaper reports; dispatches from a completely different world where people had no capacity for guilt and trampled on the weak without a second thought.”
― Andrew Michael Hurley, The Loney

“Death was a poor draughtsman and had rendered his likeness just a little off-centre, giving him the look of someone who was almost familiar but lacking the something that made him so.”
― Andrew Michael Hurley, The Loney

“death has the timing of the world’s worst comedian and I think he was right. When people die, it’s natural to regret how we treated them when they were alive. Heaven knows, there are dozens of things I wished I’d asked my mammy and daddy when they were around; times I’d like to wipe clean away. Things I wish I had or hadn’t said. It’s the worst kind of guilt, because it’s completely irreparable.”
― Andrew Michael Hurley, The Loney

“Hell was a place ruled by the logic of children. Schadenfreude that lasted for eternity.”
― Andrew Michael Hurley, The Loney

“The Other world had equality now, they said, but what they meant was that everyone had the means to exhibit their own particular unpleasantness.”
― Andrew Michael Hurley, The Loney

“Things lived at the Loney as they ought to live. The wind, the rain, the sea were all in their raw states, always freshly born and feral. Nature got on with itself. Its processes of death and replenishment happened without anyone noticing apart from Hanny and me.”
― Andrew Michael Hurley, The Loney

“It’s often hard to explain how we feel when someone close to us dies. Even to those we love. People can put on a bit of a brave front. Wilfred did pass away very unexpectedly. Maybe Mr Belderboss hasn’t quite come to terms with it yet. Grief is a peculiar business anyway and when it’s compounded with shock, it can take a wee while longer to get over it.”
― Andrew Michael Hurley, The Loney

“... the truth isn't always set in stone. In fact it never is. There are just versions of it. And sometimes it's prudent to be selective about the version you choose to give to people.”
― Andrew Michael Hurley, The Loney