Last Port of Call Quotes

“happiness, according to Aristotle anyway, which is the highest of pursuits, is achieved through virtue. So to be virtuous – not in the social sense, but to live to your highest expectations of yourself, your best self – is the route to happiness. So if a person can find the best expression of themselves, then they will be happy.”
― Jean Grainger, Last Port of Call

“What is your passion?’ Harp asked. ‘If you know what that is, then where you are geographically in the world would be irrelevant.”
― Jean Grainger, Last Port of Call

“It is not in the stars to hold our destiny but in ourselves”,’ she quoted.”
― Jean Grainger, Last Port of Call

“it is a fruitless quest to try to blend in when you are created to stand out. You will do great things, go to interesting places, meet fascinating people. You are destined for something other than this.”
― Jean Grainger, Last Port of Call

“you, and whenever you pray, for heaven to hear you.”
― Jean Grainger, Last Port of Call

“So you have to push yourself, I think, make yourself do things that are frightening. The only way to create anything original is not be afraid to be wrong.”
― Jean Grainger, Last Port of Call

“We all have only our own lives for which to take responsibility, I think. If someone is hurt by you doing what is in your heart, then surely that is their issue to resolve, not yours?”
― Jean Grainger, Last Port of Call

“There comes a time when parents have to realise they created this person but the child has their own life path to pursue, and trying to stop them, even if it is to keep them safe, is a waste of time.”
― Jean Grainger, Last Port of Call

“May God grant you always a sunbeam to warm you, a moonbeam to charm you, a sheltering angel so nothing can harm you, laughter to cheer you, faithful friends near you, and whenever”
― Jean Grainger, Last Port of Call

“There”
― Jean Grainger, Last Port of Call

“him a room. When he’d admonished”
― Jean Grainger, Last Port of Call

“conservative clothes, dark, buttoned up, old-fashioned if anything. Her hair was always pinned in a style more suited”
― Jean Grainger, Last Port of Call

“of the most delicious Cox’s Orange Pippins each autumn leaning precariously on the garden wall, the tree like a corner boy up to no good, her mother used to joke. Harp ran around the back – the front door hadn’t been opened in years at that stage – and let herself in. The kitchen was just the same, the delph from breakfast drying on the rack beside the big, deep Belfast sink, the large black flags on the floor, the table cleared and scrubbed, ready for dinner preparations, the big black enamel range that never went out heating the room, winter and summer, the tea cloths hanging on the line over it. Everything neat and tidy. She scurried out the door of the kitchen into the wide bright hallway, almost skidding on the silk carpet runner as she rounded the ornate bannister to bound up the stairs, taking two at a time. The landing overlooked the hallway and was home to a huge walnut sideboard on which sat all the china dolls Mrs Devereaux had loved. Harp thought they were a bit creepy with their glass eyes, real hair and fancy handmade clothes, and thankfully she’d never felt the”
― Jean Grainger, Last Port of Call

“At the moment she was reading a story about an archaeologist who had uncovered a plot to kill an Egyptian nobleman when he read the hieroglyphics in a previously unopened tomb in the Valley of the Kings. They revealed a curse on the nobleman’s family through time, all the way back to Ramesses. She’d had a marvellous time reading up about the tombs across the Nile from Luxor in Egypt and saw some truly graphic pictures of people who were now blind because of the river blindness caused by the blackfly there.”
― Jean Grainger, Last Port of Call

“God grant you always a sunbeam to warm you, a moonbeam to charm you, a sheltering angel so nothing can harm you, laughter to cheer you, faithful friends near you, and whenever you pray, for heaven to hear you.”
― Jean Grainger, Last Port of Call

“We can’t take in anything if we are scared or hungry or tired. But if you’re happy and relaxed, it can be done,”
― Jean Grainger, Last Port of Call

“She was learning that grief was like that; it had phases but it wasn’t linear. It wasn’t as if one moved seamlessly from shock to anger to desolation and eventually to acceptance. No, it was something different. At first, it was all-consuming, an almost unbearable pain, a physical and emotional heartache. But then she’d feel lonely and bereft, and then she would forget and laugh and smile. But a smell, a word, a book, a sound – anything could trigger it, the ice wave of realisation. It was real; he was gone and he wasn’t coming back.”
― Jean Grainger, Last Port of Call

“The only way to create anything original is not be afraid to be wrong.”
― Jean Grainger, Last Port of Call

“when you say as little as I do, you hear and notice a lot.”
― Jean Grainger, Last Port of Call

“it is a fruitless quest to try to blend in when you are created to stand out.”
― Jean Grainger, Last Port of Call

“She was learning that grief was like that; it had phases but it wasn’t linear. It wasn’t as if one moved seamlessly from shock to anger to desolation and eventually to acceptance. No, it was something different. At first, it was all-consuming, an almost unbearable pain, a physical and emotional heartache. But then she’d feel lonely and bereft, and then she would forget and laugh and smile. But a smell, a word, a book, a sound – anything could trigger it, the ice wave of realisation. It was real; he was gone and”
― Jean Grainger, Last Port of Call

“Gossip was the fuel that drove social interaction.”
― Jean Grainger, Last Port of Call

“bosthúns”
― Jean Grainger, Last Port of Call

“fighting the British in 1601 in Kinsale with the help of the Spanish; then Wolfe Tone and the French at Bantry Bay in 1798, trying to follow in the footsteps of the sans-culottes who cut the head off their king; then poor Robert Emmet, who led the United Irishmen in 1803. Throughout the centuries the Irish had fought and died for their”
― Jean Grainger, Last Port of Call

“They learned nothing of the Irish struggle against oppression in school. But she read privately all about the O’Neills and O’Donnells”
― Jean Grainger, Last Port of Call

“she could afford it on her grave. “May God grant you always a sunbeam to warm you, a moonbeam to charm you, a sheltering angel so nothing can harm you, laughter to cheer you, faithful friends near you, and whenever you pray, for heaven to hear you.”
― Jean Grainger, Last Port of Call

“just a girl. And men had all the power. And money and social class spoke louder than anything else.”
― Jean Grainger, Last Port of Call

“Besides, they were not bad people. Gossip was the fuel that drove social interaction.”
― Jean Grainger, Last Port of Call

“This is a small place and the people here are good, decent, you know, but they don’t trust what they can’t understand. And they can’t understand you, any more than they could understand Henry.”
― Jean Grainger, Last Port of Call

“She felt that living a good life and not hurting people could be achieved by non-believers as easily as by those with faith in the spiritual world.”
― Jean Grainger, Last Port of Call