The Glorious Heresies Quotes

“She had a face like a slapped arse and an arse like a bag of Doritos”
― Lisa McInerney, The Glorious Heresies

“The Church creates its sinners so it has something to save.”
― Lisa McInerney, The Glorious Heresies

“You either need to accept the past as the building blocks that brought you right up to today, or you need to be a better liar.”
― Lisa McInerney, The Glorious Heresies

“So many other boys and girls grew up with holes in their chests gaping as wide as the Christian fissure that had spat them into the world.”
― Lisa McInerney, The Glorious Heresies

“Times were tough and the people were harsh and the clergy were cruel-cruel, and you know it! The most natural thing in the world is giving birth; you built your whole religion around it. And yet you poured pitch onto girls like me and sold us into slavery and took our humanity away from us twice, a third time, as often as you could. I was lucky, Father. I was only sent away. A decade earlier and where would I have been? I might have died in your asylums, me with the smart mouth. I killed one man but you would have killed me in the name of your god, wouldn't you? How many did you kill? How many lives did you destroy with your morality and your Seal of Confession and your lies? Now. For the absolution. Once God knows you're sorry he lets you off the hook, isn't that right?

Me? Oh, Father. I know I'm sorry. What about you? Bless me Ireland for I have sinned. Go on, boy. No wonder you say infinitely God is brimming with the clemency, for how else would any of you bastards sleep at night?”
― Lisa McInerney, The Glorious Heresies

“That's the motive. Saving my soul. And let them think they're saving my soul, because in doing that they're saving me from being abused by bastards who think they have a right to rape me.”
― Lisa McInerney, The Glorious Heresies

“Here's my soul, why don't you shit on it?”
― Lisa McInerney, The Glorious Heresies

“Parents sat gloomy and still, like rows of turnips in a grocer's box. Their little criminals sat with them, tapping LOLs on their phones, or milled in the yard outside stinking of Lynx and taut nonchalance. Solicitors strode in and out in a twist of slacks and briefcases.”
― Lisa McInerney, The Glorious Heresies

“She's on her knees for a higher power. The Church craves power above all things, power above all of the living. The Church has an ideal and it'll raze all in its way to achieve it. The Church needs its blind devout. Your mother my mother, the people in there plumping Father Fiddler's ego, they're all for it. They've been given a class and they're clutching it. The Church creates its sinners so it has something to save. Your mother's a Magdalene for her Christ”
― Lisa McInerney, The Glorious Heresies

“You had to get off on it. They all got off on it. That's why your shelves were full of Call of Duty games and box sets of The Sopranos. That's why you could crowd around picking out your favourite bits from Family Guy, because you hadn't been fucked irrevocably by shit that isn't even supposed to upset you.”
― Lisa McInerney, The Glorious Heresies

“It's a funny thing that the ritual is more powerful than the killing. What's tied to the earth is less important than what's tied to the heavens. You're crosser about my language in the confessional than you are about the fact that I killed a man.”
― Lisa McInerney, The Glorious Heresies

“You told me half a story. Why won't you tell me the rest of it?
Coz you're dangerous enough with half a story, aren't you?”
― Lisa McInerney, The Glorious Heresies

“Oh my God. A dealer's telling me to stop doing drugs.
Dealing doesn't automatically make someone a cunt.
Unlike whoring.”
― Lisa McInerney, The Glorious Heresies

“His being too enveloped in opaque promise, choking the faculty with it. Eyes streaming and throats constricted with the noxious concentrate of Cork's great post-millennial of hope. Oh God, that was it. Ryan was all tied up in nasty knots of his own smothering competence.”
― Lisa McInerney, The Glorious Heresies

“There were people dying, too. That's the way of the city: one new man to take the place of another, bleeding out on a polished kitchen floor.”
― Lisa McInerney, The Glorious Heresies

“Their notion of bringing the world together under the Jesus banner hinted now at effort without recompense, and they hated it.”
― Lisa McInerney, The Glorious Heresies

“The clergy were self-professed experts in bestowing grace on behalf of the absentee landlord.”
― Lisa McInerney, The Glorious Heresies

“Below him, his city spread in soft mounds and hollows, like a duvet dropped into a well. The breeze and the elevation made”
― Lisa McInerney, The Glorious Heresies

“El marco en torno al cual construimos nuestras vidas es frágil, y en una ciudad de seres interconectados una sola viga rota puede hacer peligrar los picos y las sombras de la línea del horizonte.
Robbie O'Donovan murió mientras iba a la caza de algún sentimiento que llevarle a casa a una chica a la que se había negado a salvar, y al fallecer, convirtió en mierda estructuras que nunca había visto. Pequeñas casas. Pequeños refugios. Pequeñas vidas. La ciudad funciona a nivel macro, y ¿qué significa eso sino las agonías y los éxtasis vivos, palpitantes y sudorosos de cien mil pequeñas vidas?
La ciudad de Cork no va a fijarse en los últimos pasos vacilantes de un hombrecillo perdido. Todas esas vidas, todas esas vigas entrecruzándose en el seno de la más magnífica de las estructuras..., la ciudad no verá los palos partidos ni percibirá las primeras chispas.”
― Lisa McInerney, The Glorious Heresies

“For how could good intentions so easily dishonored ever stand a chance of saving her.”
― Lisa McInerney, The Glorious Heresies

“You just collect bulky religious souvenirs to use as murder weapons, is it? No one ever suspects the heavy hand of the Lord. Repent, repent, or Jesus might take the head off yeh!”
― Lisa McInerney, The Glorious Heresies

“That he was driven to drink by a taciturn child was as good a reason as being defective in spirit and in genetics, but the counsellors preferred internal triggers and vague spiritual shortcomings to logical grounds for needing the poison.”
― Lisa McInerney, The Glorious Heresies

“Coasting on borrowed intelligence, they spoke about all manner of insubstantialities. At”
― Lisa McInerney, The Glorious Heresies

“He knocked and the door was opened by an ould wan, about his mother's age, dressed like a chilblained scarecrow with a face that would have reversed the course of the Grand National.”
― Lisa McInerney, The Glorious Heresies

“It hit him like a midwife's slap”
― Lisa McInerney, The Glorious Heresies